How To Make Emotes for Twitch To Improve Engagement
How often have you been watching Twitch and noticed a custom emote appear when a user donates? Probably more times than you can count. Emotes are everywhere on Twitch, and if you haven’t gotten into making emotes for your channel yet, consider this your wake-up call.
Emotes are one of Twitch's greatest innovations over the years. They're a fun way to improve the look of your channel and promote your branding. They’re also a great way to increase engagement on your channel.
We’re going to look into all things emotes. We’ll talk about what they are, the different kinds that exist, and how you can make your own custom emotes for your Twitch channel. Let’s get started so you can improve your channel today!
What Are Emotes, Anyway?
First things first, we need to know what we’re working with. Let’s talk about what emotes are and how they’re used across Twitch.
Most of us are probably familiar with the concept of emotes. The word “emote” is short for “emoticon.” Emotes are small images or GIFs that can be used to convey a particular mood or emotion quickly and easily.
They’re kind of like emoji, but they’re a little bit more involved. Emojis are typically just small images inserted right alongside your text. Emotes can also be GIFs, and Twitch has set up a hierarchy system to allow for different ones to be used in specific contexts. There are also global emotes that have become a sort of language amongst Twitch users at large.
In all, emotes are an immensely important part of Twitch culture, so if you want to fit in and succeed on the platform, it’s a good idea to go full-send and create your own unique emotes.
Are There Different Types of Emotes?
Twitch has a ton of different types of emotes. Some of them are available to all users, and others are only found in certain places, channels, or events on the platform. Let’s break down the emotes that are out there:
Global Emotes
Global emotes are the emotes that every Twitch user has access to. There are hundreds of these emotes out there, and they all mean different things. They’re a great way to insert a funny comment into chats without much work.
These emotes can be used in any chat across the platform, so you’ll likely see your followers using these in your stream quite often.
Follower Emotes
Next up: Follower emotes. This is the first type of custom emotes that you can create for your channel, assuming you’re a Twitch Affiliate or Twitch Partner. Users can unlock these emotes for free once they become followers of your channel.
Recently, Twitch made follower emotes a little more universal. If a person is subscribed to your channel, then they’ll be able to use your follower emotes on any channel across Twitch. This allows you and your subs to spread your influence and brand far and wide across Twitch.
Subscriber Emotes
Subscriber emotes are the upgraded version of follower emotes. They are only available to people who subscribe to your Twitch channel. These are the special, high-quality emotes you want to reserve for your biggest fans.
You can include tiers in your subscriber emotes. Your tier two or three subs can access more emotes than your tier one subs, allowing you to create more incentives for users to subscribe to a higher tier.
Bits Tier Emotes
Next in the custom emotes category are Bits tier emotes. These are emotes that users can unlock when they Cheer a certain amount of Bits on your channel. When they donate a high enough threshold of bits, they’ll be able to cheer a highly special emote for the whole chat to see.
These emotes pop up at the top of the chat and are larger than the rest of the comments or emotes, giving users a huge reward for Cheering. Because of this, you want to make sure that these emotes are your best ones, providing an incentive for your users to Cheer, which is one of the best ways to make money on Twitch.
As a side note: It’s incredibly important that you engage with Cheering commenters. They are contributing to your channel, so make it worthwhile for them!
You’ll have different emote badges for different levels of Bits contributed. You’ll start off with three emote tiers: 1,000 bits, 5,000 bits, and 10,000 bits. As users contribute more, you’ll unlock higher tiers so you can create more emotes.
Again, make sure that you make it worth it for people to give a lot of bits. If users have a good experience Cheering, they’re more likely to do it again, and other users who see them Cheering will be more likely to take the leap.
Event Emotes
Finally, we have event emotes. These are emotes that users can unlock by engaging with certain events on Twitch. They’re not super common, but they’re quite a badge of honor if you have them.
How To Make Emotes for Your Channel
At this point, you might be wondering, “This seems like a lot of work. Is it really worth it to make all of these emotes for my channel? Why can’t I just use the stock emotes?”
Channels with custom emotes are likelier to get chat engagement than channels that only use the stock Twitch emotes. This means more comments, more followers, more subs, more bits, and more success for your channel. Engaging with your audience is everything!
So while it isn’t necessary for you to customize emotes, it will absolutely help to improve engagement on your channel. This custom branding will create an incentive for people to engage with your channel. Exclusivity drives people to want to take action, and emotes help to create that special feeling in users' minds.
1. Become an Affiliate or Partner
Custom emotes are only available for channels that have become Affiliate or Partner, so make sure you reach the follower threshold so you have the custom emote feature unlocked.
2. Find a Designer
There are lots of different ways to go about creating your emotes. The simplest way is to hire a graphic designer to do it for you. You can give them certain images, quotes, or GIFs to incorporate and give them some inspiration or vision, and they’ll do all the work.
But if you don’t have the extra cash to outsource that, there are plenty of programs that make it easy. For example, Canva is a free design platform that has emote templates available. This makes it incredibly easy to design an emote that’s unique to your channel.
3. Gather Some Content
It’s important to make your emotes reflect your channel — you want cohesive branding and memorable emotes. To that end, gather some iconic elements from your stream to work into your emotes.
If you have a catchphrase or two that you use on your channel, turn it into a text emote with a cool font and fun colors. If there’s an iconic, hilarious image of you floating around, turn it into an emote for your highest Cheers. Use pictures of your cat, your channel’s logo, or characters from the game you play most. Get creative!
Just make sure that the theme stays relatively consistent. You want your emotes to be identifiable with your brand and channel, so use a consistent color scheme and design elements if you can!
4. Create Tiers
Make sure that when you’re creating your emotes, you make some of them a little more intricate than others. You don’t want your low-level follower emotes to be better than your 10,000-bit Cheermote. So make sure there is some variance in your emotes.
A simple way to do this is with GIFs. Lower-level emotes can be still images with basic, while higher-level emotes can be exciting GIFs with inside jokes you create with your subs.
5. Upload to Twitch
Now that you’ve prepared your emotes, it’s time to post them on your channel and get your followers to start using them.
Open up your Creator Dashboard. In the left-hand dropdown menu, select Viewer Rewards and then select Emotes. Here you can see all the emotes that are available to you. Channels with smaller followings can only have a few emotes, but the more your channel grows, the more emotes you’ll be able to make.
Make sure your emotes are 112 x 112px image size and that they don’t exceed 1 MB. Also, they must be a .png file!
Go through and upload all your emotes to the appropriate places, and you’re ready to let your followers start using these emotes to their hearts’ content. Watch as your channel’s engagement increases! You may even start to earn a bit more money and watch your channel grow.
The Wonderful World of Custom Emotes
As your channel grows, you’ll be able to unlock more emote slots for your followers to use. So make sure you check back in on your dashboard every once in a while to keep your emotes up to date.
Emoticons are a powerful tool that can boost your channel’s engagement, so make sure to announce whenever you implement them and encourage your followers and subscribers to use your brand-new emotes!
For more information about streaming on Twitch and tools that can help you create videos across multiple platforms, check out Powder's blog and see how your content creation can be made easier.
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