How to Live Stream: The Complete Guide for Businesses

Author: Ben Mulholland / Source: Business 2 Community What do you think about this? Interesting 1 Not Interesting Share Tweet Learning ho

Author: Ben Mulholland / Source: Business 2 Community

What do you think about this?

Interesting

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Learning how to live stream may be intimidating, but it’s insanity to ignore the marketing opportunities and advantages it creates for your brand and company.

Want to engage your audience beyond your written content? 80% of brand audiences prefer watching a live video to reading a blog post.

Reaching out through social media? Live videos get more than double (+135%) the organic reach of photo posts.

In fact, producing live videos:

Lets you reach a wider audience
Encourages active engagement with your brand
Builds stronger relationships with your viewers
Makes you stand out from the crowd

To help you take advantage of live streaming, I’ll break down the benefits of doing it, the platforms and equipment you can use, and the types of streams you can host. If you want to know why, what, and how to live stream to give your marketing efforts a boost, keep reading.

Why bother live streaming?

Live streaming is still relatively new, with the last few years in particular seeing a surge in what the general public can do.

Today anyone with a mobile phone can set up and stream, or join one to watch and talk to the broadcaster – news stories are brought to life, showing different angles of an event, confusion and all.

So why not take advantage of it?

“Clare Means was playing her guitar on Santa Monica Pier. No more than 15 people were there, but she could press a button and there would be 100,000 fans watching her. It’s a TV station at her fingertips.” – Kayvon Beykpour, CEO of Periscope, talking to WIRED

Let’s break down the main advantages of live streaming.

You reach a wider audience

Social media is, by design, filled with filter bubbles – echo chambers of news and content created by algorithms. Put simply, if you like and engage with a particular type of content or topic, you’ll see more of the same thing.

Knowing this, it’s hard to break into peoples’ bubbles and expose them to your carefully crafted content. This is where live streaming comes in, as it will increase your organic reach by 135% compared to a regular photo post.

In other words, if you post on social media to market your brand, live videos will get more than double the exposure (both to current and new audience members) of a photo post.

It builds relationships with viewers

Depending on the type of stream you host, live videos can build also strong relationships with your viewers. They’re given the chance to see and talk to you live, humanizing both your content and your business.

This is especially true if you’re interacting with the comments or chat feed while you broadcast. By responding to viewers you’re demonstrating that you pay attention to your audience, who will, in turn, remember the experience and the points you made.

That positive reinforcement can help to quickly turn viewers into customers – never underestimate the power of connecting to your audience.

Regular streaming makes you organize your time

The best results when live streaming are seen by those who plan out a predictable schedule, with the occasional spur-of-the-moment stream. If your audience knows when you’ll be live they can make a note of it and/or free up time to watch you.

To do this, you need to be managing your time effectively.

By disciplining yourself to stream at a set time, for a set length, X times per week, you can plan the rest of your tasks around that and more easily piece together your day. If nothing else, this is a great way to see where you’re wasting time and work out how you could be better spending it.

Streaming reinforces your company values and message

It’s important to have a consistent message behind your company – a rallying call to show exactly what you stand for. Unfortunately, if several people are outwardly representing you (eg, 5 different live stream hosts) this message can be diluted by different attitudes and approaches to your audience.

While that’s a negative, sooner or later you’re going to have to clearly stamp out your values, and there’s no better way to make them crystal clear than by live streaming.

Much like with time management, streaming regularly (and especially with multiple hosts) forces you to think about how you’re going to present your company, event, and team in general. In turn, your business as a whole will benefit from that clarity just by having something to center itself around.

Broadcasts can be repurposed

Repurposing content is a great way to get some extra bang for your marketing buck. For example, you could turn a successful blog post into an infographic and SlideShare to get even more traction without needing extra information.

Live streamed content is no exception. From a single live stream, you can create:

A raw video recording
Edited highlights
An article based on your topic
An article drawing from the comments your audience made
An infographic from your topic
A SlideShare

All of that, from one casual live streaming session – bargain.

Choosing your streaming platform

The first step to seeing all of the advantages of live streaming in action is to choose your streaming platform – that is, where you’ll be showing your live stream.

You’re probably already heard of (or seen) a Facebook Live video, and while the main social media sites are good streaming options, they’re not your be-all-end-all choices.

To keep things simple, we’ll look at the three main options:

You can also stream to Facebook and Youtube Live at the same time, but more on that after we’ve gone through each platform individually.

Facebook Live is great for exposure

Probably the best-known example of live streaming right now is Facebook Live. This allows users and pages to live stream from their mobile device or desktop, with viewers being able to comment (as standard Facebook comments) and react (“Like”, “Love”, etc) in real time.

Stream quality on Facebook is usually pretty good, and the site’s massive user base provides a huge potential audience for the video.

The main disadvantage of Facebook Live comes when you try to repurpose your content. Facebook videos don’t rank in Google, and even though you can autosave footage to your timeline, it will quickly get buried in your audience’s news feeds.

In other words, if you want to get traffic to your videos going forwards, you’ll have to manually reupload them to Youtube.

After all, Facebook isn’t designed to be a site of evergreen content – it’s millions of separate timelines that are all about the here-and-now. Facebook Live is a great option if you’re just looking to engage your audience and get some exposure, but not so much for structured or evergreen clips.

In short, Facebook Live:

Has the largest potential audience
Isn’t great for the audience interacting with the streamer
Isn’t designed for evergreen videos
Very good for show-and-tell casual streams
Has desktop and mobile streaming capabilities

Twitter is awesome for a casual audience rapport

After crushing the competition, Twitter’s streaming app Periscope was eventually integrated to let you stream directly from the mobile app.

Although it has a smaller user base, the main advantage of streaming on Twitter is the extra audience interaction it allows.

Facebook has a bigger audience, but comments are just regular Facebook post comments that can be shown on the stream. Twitter, meanwhile, makes it much easier for your audience to @mention each other and talk to both you and the rest of your viewers.