Five Recommendations to Improve Your Live-Stream Content
Live-streamed videos are a great addition to improve your social-media marketing campaign tactics. By now, you should be well-aware of how popular video content is on social media platforms and using it generously on your social media platforms. Live-streaming has become an important way to give an extra boost to awareness of your marketing. Facebook and Twitter are both pushing streaming content by providing dedicated space on their apps and send alerts to users for live-streamed videos.
What’s even better is that mainstream media outlets have been adding live-streaming content to their platforms, right next to their regular news content on their sites. This creates the very real possibility that your live-streaming content may find itself placed right alongside with the content from established high traffic outlets and these videos will go viral instantly. This is an excellent boost to your exposure and reach that doesn’t need explaining.
It may sound intimidating to consistently create live-streaming videos that, but the potential benefits are large if done well. To get you going, Twitter has recommended using a platform called Periscope for your live-streaming videos and released a five-step guide of recommendations to make you successful.
1) Plan to Use Periscope Producer
Periscope Producer is a tool that helps you broadcast live from a range of devices besides your phone or tablet.
With Periscope Producer, you can live-stream from Virtual Reality headsets, games and desktop streaming software, along with professional grade video cameras and studio equipment that you probably don’t have yet.
It’s a tool used by professionals that you can and should take advantage of and it expands your live-streaming device options. And people can still send hearts and comments across the screen when you use it.
A tutorial for using Periscope Producer is available here.
2) Build Anticipation
There will be times when something is happening or you just come up with something spontaneously that will only work if you live-stream it right in the moment. Those instances can occasionally be unavoidable, but for your business account, it is probably much better to build some anticipation so viewers know about it and have planned to watch it. Your live-streaming boost to your marketing campaign isn’t effective if no one is watching it or aren’t aware of your efforts.
You want the biggest possible audience to drive engagement and have more users seeing your brand messaging. Let everyone know and send alerts to your groups and place postings on your social media pages ahead of time to promote your upcoming live-streaming content. If you have an email distribution list, use it.
Twitter is using their trending section to alert people to live-streaming content that they could be interested in, and Facebook is doing something similar by placing “Popular Live Video” alerts on user’s pages, even if it isn’t a page that user happens to follow. Create those alerts and increase the chances that you are reaching out to new users and building your brand even more.
3) Attention Grabbing Titles
You can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but the title is probably why you looked at it. It’s not different with your live-streaming content.
The title should give users an idea of what to expect and be relevant to the content during the live-streaming and immediately after.
Try fitting an Emoji in your title if you can. Emojis can express a lot of words at once, are very popular, look trendy, and can make you stand out.
The title is also how people are going to find any of your content, so a good descriptive title will aid in getting you connected to the right audience.
4) Organize Your Set Up Beforehand
A little bit of unpredictability is part of what makes live-streaming interesting to viewers, but if you come across as completely unprofessional, viewers will quickly flee your business. Twitter notes that it doesn’t need to be a polished performance, but you need to prepare the basics so you don’t turn viewers off with a disjointed, problem-plagued live-stream. Stopping mid-stream and saying “Excuse me” while you fiddle with equipment is not what you want.
Think ahead and make sure you have covered the basics. Be prepared for your live-streaming video ensure that you have promoted it to everyone in your network. You want to see what you get good engagement on, and when it happens most, so you know when to livestream your videos. According to Twitter, these are some things you should take care of and test before you start your live-streaming:
- Batteries – Whether it’s your phone or another device, make sure they are fully charged.
- Signal strength – Is it strong enough from where you will be broadcasting? You don’t want your video dropping out in the middle or being choppy.
- Audio Quality- Two thing to worry about here:
- Background noise.
- Overall audio quality from your equipment.
- Shaky Videos – Do you have a tripod? Yes, you can try to use a steady hand, but a tripod is a surefire way to keep distractions like a bouncing video from causing your audience to lose interest. It’s also lets you concentrate on your content.
- Rapidly Catch Their Attention
Videos auto-play in people’s Twitter and Facebook streams, so you must catch their attention as they scroll. The starting few seconds of video frame are critical, potential viewers need to instantly see a reason to stick around and watch more of it.
Twitter advises that you don’t have long start times, countdowns or other lag times. When they see the video, it needs to show something interesting, you can’t waste those precious seconds with a “3,2,1” being what they see. Instant action, instant click from a potential viewer.
Live-streaming can be a useful boost to your brand outreach. It may not seem easy to live-stream quality content, but once you get started it will be a real benefit to you.
Using the 5 recommendations in this article will go a long way to helping you create live-streaming content and maximize the return for your efforts.
