Live gives you the chance to interact in real time with your audience and fans. Help drive conversation and deepen the connection with your audience to make your viewers feel a sense of community.
How to moderate live chat on YouTube
Build community
Chat is a great space to deepen the connection between you and your audience. Make them feel part of your community by encouraging them to speak with you and each other.Find breaks in your stream
Do you worry about awkward pauses in your stream? Or about getting tired of talking continuously? Chat can be a great way to build in breaks. Before going live, plan out where you might see natural breaks or where you can build in breaks to interact with your audience. You can fill breaks in by:
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Reading through the chat |
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Recognising Super Chats and calling out new members |
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Giving life or game updates |
Examples of breaks in gaming live streams:
- Some games have more consistent action and story building that will lead to more consistent chats but less obvious breaks to interact with your viewers. Valkyrae checks in with her audience to discuss strategy throughout gameplay.
- Utilise loading screens or obvious breaks in gameplay to talk with your audience. Valkyrae checks in on the chat in between gameplay to see what her audience is talking about and calls out quick summaries.
Speak directly with your fans
Help your audience to feel like a part of the community by replying directly to their chat and answering questions.
- Have an ongoing conversation with viewers and ask questions.
- Check on chat as often as you can. Summarise the conversation or call out some messages so that your audience knows that you're listening.
- Capitalise on in-stream jokes and funny moments.
- Set up a poll and have your audience choose what you will do next.
- Use the Live Q&A feature to take questions from your audience to answer during your stream.
This creator uses polls to get her viewers involved in the live stream by asking them what she should do next during gameplay.
I messed up... Roblox with KREW!
Audience questions are answered and members get shout-outs during this ItsFunneh live stream.
Build rituals
WE BEAT STORY MODE!!! [SUPER MARIO MAKER] [STORY MODE] [#03] [ENDING]
DashieGames sings a song welcoming back viewers to the tune of the game's intro music for his Mario Maker 2 streams.
How to set up live chat
Tips to manage a safe and fun live chat experience:
- Assign moderators for live chat sessions to interact with the audience, remove inappropriate messages and hide abusive users. This feature will help to save your time and energy for the live stream.
- You can block web links and certain words in chat in the community settings section, which can help manage spam during your stream.
- Slow down the overall chat rate by setting a time limit between chat messages to change how often a user can post. (This limit doesn't affect the channel owner, moderators and paid YouTube channel members.)
- You can have YouTube hold potentially inappropriate live chat messages. If you opt in, live chat messages that our system identifies will be held for review and you have the final decision to show or hide them.
- You can choose to limit participation in the live chat to members, subscribers or specific people.
- There are additional gaming and live streaming tools from third parties. After a live stream has ended, live chat replay is available on archives. When creating highlight clips from an archived video, the live chat replay can add depth to make viewers feel like they're experiencing real-time reactions.
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