Today it isn’t a question of whether you should invest in live video, it’s really about how to do it with the most impact and engagement. With nearly most people (80% of consumers) saying live video is what makes them stop what they’re doing and lead in, the opportunity for live video is stronger than ever before.
Getting the most from your live video strategy requires you to look at your real-time broadcasts a little differently. If you can orientate your whole content creation strategy around live broadcasts, the recording of those events and repurposing of that content then you will maximize the engagement at every view.
In this short article we will go into a number of ways you can leverage your live streams for maximized engagement with viewers and customers engaging with your brand.
The Top Video Live Streaming Statistics To Know
Always record your live streams and make them available for playback later.
This is a pretty easy one. Record every live event you do and make those recordings available to everyone at any-point. Even years later. Most video content will have a considerable amount of shelf-life. Consider organizing the on demand content on your website for SEO purposes.
With some channels such as Instagram live stories may disappear from the timeline of your profile, but with new features such as story archives and story highlights, you can now save them for later viewing with no expiration on the content.
YouTube makes recording and publishing easy by automatically posting recorded live streams to your YouTube channel when the broadcast ends.
Optimize to grow your audience across social media channels
One of the big benefits from streaming live across social media channels, is the amplification of that broadcast and the ability for users and followers to share your videos. The more followers you have, the larger the audience and the bigger the compound effect.
Also consider cross-promoting across social media channels. For example you could run a live stream on both Instagram and Facebook at the same time and expand your audience. There is even software now that can enable you to stream across 10 social media channels at once. Talk about amplification!
3 Simple Ways To Boost Live Stream Audience Amplification
Create compelling titles and descriptions for your live broadcasts.
Whether you’re streaming the video on your own website or across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, the title and the description of your broadcast are supper important. Not only to catch people’s attention but also for SEO and search. Having a great title can entice someone to click and watch your video. Make sure to think through all your descriptions in detail before posting.
Create thumbnails that capture viewer attention to entice clicks
If you are streaming live across social media then creating a special thumbnail for your live event is critical. The same goes for when the live broadcast ends, you want to entice viewers to click through to watch and a well thought out thumbnail is the way to do that.
Work with a social influencer or thought leader in your industry.
The rise of Instagram and Twitter has created what is known as the ‘social influencer’ or a personality on social media with thousands or millions of followers that tends to ‘influence’ and impact their audience. Brands work with social media influencers to amplify their reach, or to get narrow in targeted. The same can be done with live video.
Consider hosting a live stream broadcast on Instagram with a social influencer, leveraging their account and their audience. Post stream come up with an agreement to promote your content on their social channels and participate in more live streams in the future.
Working with influencers will greatly expand your audience, exposing you to new people.
Turn a single live stream into multiple video clips
You shouldn’t always assume that everyone who wants to watch your live stream can make it to the actual live event. People are busy and generally want to consumer content on their time, when it makes sense for them. Also, so many topics can be covered in a single live stream that it can sometimes be difficult for people to digest all at once.
Chop up your live stream into clips based on topics covered. These videos can be great for sharing on social media or in a gallery on your website. Again, video clips help with SEO and should drive more people to your brand.
Transcribe the video and write a blog post
This is an easy one. Once the broadcast wraps, transcribe the audio to text and translate that text into a blog article that can be shared on the web. You can also associate your on demand recording of the live event with the blog article for maximum effect.
Send out a video email promoting your live stream
Promote your live event before it happens and after it wraps with a video email. The email can link to where the video lives, such as it is linked on YouTube, Facebook or your website. Add an engaging thumbnail to the email to entice the viewers to click and watch.
Turn the video into an audio podcast
Another easy one — extract the audio from your video recordings of the lvie stream and convert them into a podcast for sharing across various podcast platforms. Some consumers rather listen to audio over visuals like a blog post or video. This is especially true if they are working in an office environment. Podcasts are a great way to expose you to audiences that you thought you would never reach.
There are a number of easy tools to make podcasts, in fact most video editing software will allow you to export audio files of the video. Tools like Amazon’s SoundCloud make it easy to upload that audio and share a podcast anywhere on the web for free.
Use the right combination of software to manage all of this and get it right.
Now that we’ve shared all those ideas around how you can maximize the impact and engagement of your live streams, it’s now time to consider the software tools needed to do that. Take a look at our directory of video software and see if you can find your perfect fit.