Boomer Elmsdale
Live streaming events are powerful and growing in popularity on social media. Youtube Live, Instagram, Twitter and Discord all give special treatment to live events with more than 150M Americans tuning in to live streamed events. The networks promote live events heavily, which helps grow your following.
Live events are prominently displayed on social platforms so people can easily find them and join the conversation. This makes it easier to grow followers and/or subscribers so your audience grows over time, giving you more control to message directly from your channels in the future.
Consider making your studio time live in order to Leverage Twitter Spaces, YouTube Live, Twitch or Discord Stage Channels, where you can interact with a live audience remotely. This is a very engaging form of content, albeit less controlled because it is live.
It was reported that during the pandemic, people watched live videos 10-20x longer than pre-recorded videos and that 70% of people replaced live events with streaming videos in terms of their free time.
Virtually every social network hosts a live event or live streaming function. However, for podcasts and video zoom panels, which Contentz helps you produce, we have aggregated information for the five most relevant live streaming channels for our clients today.
YouTube is Google’s video network that is extremely popular with over 2 Billion users. That means all demographics are covered. The site has so much content pushing through every day that it serves as a search engine as well. YouTube Live allows creators to interact with users via live video and real time chat. The videos automatically save as well. The cloud storage aspect of the service is unparalleled with YouTube enabling unlimited storage. Some services restrict this. YouTube is traditionally a space for longer form content. You will want to plan how to use YouTube versus other platforms and YouTube live is a great option for live streaming. If YouTube is a part of your strategy overall, then YouTube Live is a great way to push up stream counts and subscribers. Building your subscriber base unlocks additional features. For example, you can customize your links, thumbnails and more.
Twitter Spaces is a powerful feature from Twitter that allows any user (business or personal) with 600 followers or more to host a live audio conversation on the platform. There can be one host and 11 speakers. When you go live with a space, your followers see a purple bubble at the top of your timeline for the durations of the conversation. The powerful thing about Twitter is that 50% of their users are on Twitter daily and the primary age demographic is 35-49 years old. This age group is responsible for buying decisions in many industries. Last, 90% of the population knows what Twitter is, so there is little waste in promoting the service to your existing audience. Alternatively, teaching a contact about Discord may present challenges due to the learning.
Discord lets friends chat with each other either one-to-one or as a group via a server. Don’t be scared off by the term server. For the novice, the user experience just feels like selecting a list of chat rooms. It’s not difficult technically. Discord streaked in popularity during the onset of Crypto, NFT trading and Web3 in 2021. Businesses or individuals can use the service to send direct messages, have video calls, voice chat and screen share on the platform. Over 250M people are on the platform. This is where groups broke out and have aligned on projects and where projects have distributed information to groups of people at one time. It is a powerful platform that is becoming more mainstream and useful to regional businesses.
More than 1 Billion people use Instagram every month, and it is one of the most popular platforms for small businesses. This is because it is easy to use, appeals to a mass audience and it is interactive. Instagram’s DM offers voice recording message feature, vanish mode and linking, making it nearly as effective as email for small businesses, especially on initial outreach. Like the other platforms, live video is promoted front and center and it that makes it easier to attract viewers and grow your following. You are able to save live videos and many companies opt to deliver these as short reels in posts or stories. These actions are rewarded by Instagram and pushed to the front of other posts that feature still footage. Around 60% of influencers say they get the best engagement from Instagram.
TikTok exploded onto the scene over the past couple of years, specializing in short form video content. A powerful network of estimated 3.1M influencers have leveraged this into sales for small and large brands alike. TikTok Live video boasts success stories for live shopping events. However, you will have to grow your following before you are able to access these features for your brand. It is written that you must be older than 16 years old and have more than 1,000 followers in order to use TikTok’s live shopping feature. A unique aspect to that feature is that creators may receive virtual gifts from watchers, if they are 18 and over. There is lots of room for development as TikTok matures its offering. Consider adding TikTok to you mix on social and add live shopping as it fits.
Pull up your show objective and match that with whatever live streaming service you choose. You will want to make sure your objective and strategies match the audience and tool set within your streaming service. For example, if you don’t want a gaming audience or traits a gaming audience has, then you would be building that audience on a service like Twitch. Building an audience may be lucrative but the cost may exceed your budget. These things need to be understood before investing time and money on a platform.
