Key tips for going live on socials to help pull in your audience and be professional.
Live video allows you to give your audience a special, behind the scenes look into your business. Live streaming draws longer streams and higher engagement rates – viewers spend up to 8.1x longer with live video than video-on-demand.
Promote before going live
It’s important to let your audience know beforehand that you plan to go live at a specific time. Seeing live videos as events rather than posts is a great way of viewing going live – you’d want to promote an event to make sure people show up.
If you’re going live on Facebook, creating an event, inviting your followers and even promoting will create awareness for that all important viewership.
Plan ahead
It goes without saying that planning for anything is best practice for success and utilising live video is no exception. Prepare material to discuss on your live – having a note/plan on your live event will provide necessary structure especially when interacting and answering questions with your viewers.
Time it right
Timing is crucial. You don’t want your prime audience to be working or asleep while you plan to go live. Thinking and researching your audience and when they are most active on social media is a must. Businesses such as SproutSocial release regular Facebook analytic reports that can provide you with the relevant information to help you reach your demographic.
Constantly offer context
The nature of live video means that viewers can join at any moment and may have already missed the introductions, being aware of this is important to keep people interested. As more people join the event make sure to reflect on introductions and inform the audience of what’s happening on screen.
Be interactive and responsive
What makes live video so interesting is the ability of viewers to interact and ask questions during the live event, allowing the host to communicate and answer any queries from the audience.
A powerful way to increase engagement is addressing comments that appear on screen – this encourages other viewers to talk to the host and be interactive. If you think receiving too many questions/comments may be an issue then getting a colleague to assist could be beneficial.
Live video is a fantastic, intimate feature on social media platforms and we highly recommend utilising it for your business.
If you need support/advice regarding live video or any video format we are the team for you. Drop us a message and we’ll be happy to start a conversation! Contact us.