Shoutouts are one of Twitch’s latest additions to chat, giving streamers the ability to highlight notable chat members and prompt fellow chatters to follow them. This new command came shortly after the host feature on Twitch was disabled, resulting in some community backlash surrounding the loss of the long standing feature.
Shoutouts provide another means of giving support to fellow content creators on Twitch, encouraging viewers to follow another streamer while the broadcaster hosting the shoutout can still remain live. This differs from a raid, as raids require users to end broadcast after selecting a creator to ship viewers off to. Shoutouts also appear in the selected creator’s activity feed, showcasing how many viewers they were shouted out to.
Unlike many other Twitch functions for streamers, shoutouts can be given directly in chat and with far more ease than many other similar services. This is how to do a shoutout on Twitch.
How to give a shoutout on Twitch
Twitch streamers are able to give shoutouts directly from their chat rooms. Typing in the ‘/shoutout’ command with the name of the selected channel afterwards, the given user will be featured at the top of the stream chat in a banner. In the banner will be an integrated follow button that will allow viewers to immediately follow the highlighted creator’s channel. The user does not have to be an active streamer or live in order to receive a shoutout.
The top banner will have a drop down feature that will provide some further details for viewers who want more information before potentially following. The drop down box will tell viewers the category the featured Twitch user had streamed last and whenever their next livestream may be.
The shoutout will remain on screen for a relatively short duration before eventually disappearing. Twitch streamers have no limit to how many shoutouts they may give per stream.
