Building connections with your community is not only essential to becoming a successful live streaming creator, it is also emotionally rewarding and can make a real impact on the lives of both creators and their community. One way to build and strengthen your relationship with your audience is by making them part of your show.

There are many ways to make them part of your show, like inviting your audiences as guests to your live show, or setting up a hot line for your audience to call in. Or, as the young and creative YouTuber Gabe Helmy has done so expertly and in such an engaging way, you can ask your community to send to you things that they'd love to share with you via email (like what do they have for lunch, which show they are currently watching, and what do they want to say to the creator), and during your live show, you can share with your audience things your community members have sent you and share your feelings.

But of course, the aforementioned methods are not without their downsides. Take Gabe's approach, for instance, while it's really creative and engaging, showing all the images his fans sent him via screen sharing is not visually appealing. As for inviting your audiences as guests to the show or having them call the hot line during live, you don't have full control over what your audiences might say or show, thus risking leaving an unpleasant experience for both the host and audiences.

To eliminate the concern about inappropriate behavior/content from your audiences, while still making sure your audience can be part of your show, we at Opus came up with Video Comments - an engagement-magnifying feature that enables your community to create video comments as easily as creating TikTok videos and send them to the creator with one click, who can then show those videos in their live shows. And one of the best parts is, all the videos are automatically transcribed, so that creators will know at a glance what their fans are talking about before showing them on screen and don't need to worry about content moderation issues.

Video comments allow your audience to express their thoughts and feelings to the extent that simple words cannot express. It not only gives live streaming creators full control over what their audiences show on stage, but also makes your audiences an important part of your show. Imagine how much joy your audiences would feel when they know that they are co-creating the live show with you!

We strongly feel that the live streaming age hasn't lived up to its potential of building and strengthening relationships between creators and their community, and that's why we are taking our first step forward by introducing Video Comments. We believe it can supercharge engagement during your live show, and help you bond with your community tighter. We encourage every creator to sign up for Opus at Opus.pro, try out Video Comments for their live shows, and enjoy a better and closer relationship with their community!