A Guide to Diversifying Social Media for VTubers
Alright, today VTubers, we are going to talk about diversifying your platforms and having backups (because twitter is scaring me right now!)
In this day and age, relying on one social media platform to preserve all your content is a bad idea for a few reasons!
1) a platform may change or die at any time
2) having your audience all on one site will mean starting from scratch later if a social media site dies!
3) Staying on one platform limits your audience and makes it hard for people who aren't on the same platform to enjoy your content.
Here are a few social media sites I recommend checking out for VTubers (some are more 18+ so beware)
- Tumblr
- Reddit (r/virtualyoutubers)
- Mastodon
- Misskey
- Instagram/Threads (beware of TOS)
- Bluesky (invite only)
- VStream (coming soon)
- Discord (I will have to talk about discord another day)
First thing's first, make a business/VTuber email you can use across all your social media, so that your email updates all go in one place! Then it's time to sign up everywhere, so that you save your handle on all social media sites you may want to use in the future! I know this may feel silly to do if you're still small, but if you go viral all of a sudden, it may be too late to grab your username!
Next, decide on what social media sites are right for you and your audience. To do this, read Terms of Service and do some research on each platform. It's completely up to you and your values which sites you decide to use. Once you decide on which social media sites you want to be active on, bookmark each one. Then set up either Carrd or Linktree to keep all these links in one place. Carrd is a mini website maker and is more customizable, but Linktree is easier to set up! Now with carrd/Linktree set up, you can use one link for ALL your social media! Put your carrd/linktree in your bio of all your social media sites across the board!
But now you have a new problem: How do you stay active across all social media sites at once? This is a tricky problem. Here's my semi-doable solution: I prepare my posts in Google docs, and copy paste the text into each site manually. It really helps if you have all the social media sites logged in and book marked next to each other. It's a bit more work, but it gives me the peace of mind that none of my audience members are missing out on any updates I give (no matter how silly the updates may be!) Over time, you may be able to narrow down the social media sites you post on once again. You make take off on certain social media sites more than others, or the policies may change And though this thread is more about text based social media, be sure to have a backup for your videos and streams too! I use odysee for that because it automatically backs up all my youtube videos for free. I also have a dedicated external hard drive for all my videos and VODs!
Even if you don't think your social media content is good or worth preserving, you are going to want your early content preserved for posterity sake one day. And if your social media site of choice goes down, all your posts and audience will go down with it.
Happy VTubing everyone, and good luck out there!
yaoikot