You just don’t go live just for the sake of going live, do you?
Absolutely not! That’s never the aim of live streaming. The ultimate objective is always to acquire more viewership and convert more leads to your business. That said, you must figure out several ways to engage with your existing and potential audience and make your live streaming strategy successful. While there are numerous other means of increasing engagement on your live streams, OneStream experts have curated a list of the most effective ways to promote your live video broadcasts.
In this Article:
📣 Why Promote your Live Streams?
First things first; why do you need to promote your live streams?
- Promoting your live streams help build brand awareness and recognition amongst both existing and potential audiences.
- It creates a sense of curiosity about your content/products/services.
- It plays a pivotal role in establishing long-term relationships with your customers and building brand loyalty.
- It grabs your audience’s attention and keeps them hooked and coming back for more.
- It offers you a competitive edge over rival brands.
📢 How to Promote your Live Streams?
💥 Before the Live Broadcast
1. Schedule your Live Streams
Although you can go live right away anytime, it’s always better to schedule your live broadcasts days in advance. This will give you enough time to promote your live stream, collect more contacts, and have a solid viewer base ready before you broadcast your content. You might want to add a showcard that illustrates the topic, date, and time of your scheduled live and let your viewers prepare for the event.
Read More: Tips to Schedule your Videos for Greater Reach
2. Post your Scheduled Live Broadcast Everywhere
Even if you plan to broadcast live on one or two channels, don’t forget to promote it on all other media anyways. So, let’s say you’re planning to go live on Facebook only; you should still post the announcement on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and all other social media platforms where you actively maintain your presence. Ask your friends, followers, partners, and all others to share and repost your live streams. Put up Instagram and Facebook stories regularly until the day of your broadcast. The catch is not to let any stone remain unturned.
3. Ask for Registrations
The most promising means of increasing viewership and promoting your streams is to ask people to register for your live streams. You can put in a little effort to collect valuable viewer contact information and use it for later purposes. Here’s how you can get people to register for your live streams:
- Registration form on your landing page – create a registration form on your landing page. Include the link in your social media posts, emails, and ads to get more people to register. Once they have signed up, you can regularly send them stream reminders.
- Sign-up forms – if you do not have your website, you can create a form using different online forms like Google Forms, collect the necessary viewer data, and save it for later use.
4. Send Email Reminders
Keep a set of emails ready before every live broadcast to send out to those who have subscribed to your live streams. These should be sent out as reminders 2-5 days before the actual broadcast and must contain all the essential information regarding your next event: topic, date and time for the broadcast, and which channel/platform to tune into. Email marketing is the new marketing hack in the live streaming industry.
💥 During the Live Broadcast
5. Engage with Audience while Broadcasting Live
Once you’ve done all the backend homework, now is the time to go live and shine. During the broadcast, ask your viewers to like your page, subscribe to your channel, join your community, share your live stream in other groups, and so forth. Ask engaging questions with your audience to allow them to interact with you in real-time. Plan giveaways to ensure maximum participation from your audience. Ask them to comment on your streams and respond to them in real-time using OneStream’s Live Unified Chat feature. The more people interact with your live streams, the more the chances of your video becoming visible to others.
Read More: How to Engage Maximum Audience During a Live Stream? An Ultimate Guide
6. Use Engaging & Trending Hashtags
Hashtags play a critical role in creating a buzz around your live broadcast and making it easier for the viewers to find all the relevant posts. Hashtags represent your event and your brand and help people to recognize and associate with your live stream. Make sure you keep it short and simple, so it’s easy for people to memorize and associate with you. Remember the Fortnite live concerts hashtag #PartyRoyale? This hashtag fetched almost 24k posts, giving a solid boost to the live streams.
Read: Instagram Hashtag Guide – How to Use Hashtags to Promote your Business
7. Multistream
Multistreaming is the most effective promotion mechanism and the most effective tool for increasing your audience base. You must reach out and grab your audience wherever they hang out the most. With OneStream Live, you can broadcast your live streams, whether pre-recorded or real-time, to more than 40 social media platforms (like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Twitch) and the web simultaneously.
Read: Create & Multistream your Broadcasts with OneStream Studio
8. Brand your Live Streams
Never miss a chance to brand your live streams. Add graphics and custom overlays to your live streams. Use your photo as the profile picture on your channels to help establish a personal connection with your audience. Use OneStream Live to add custom thumbnails to your videos and brand your live streams. This will create an overall memorable experience for your target audience, enhance your brand recognition and recall, and promote your content across your audiences.
💥 After the Live Broadcast
9. Analyze your Streaming Analytics
Analytics, better known as the success metrics of the data world, are an effective mechanism for measuring the performance of your online video efforts. Some of these metrics are pretty straightforward, and the majority of the people are aware of how to assess them to measure the success of their live streams. For example, the number of views of a live stream on just about any platform is the most basic metric for video creators to measure their outreach. However, there are several advanced-level analytics that large-scale businesses and marketers must actively assess to measure the success of their live streaming strategy: visitor hits, watch time, average duration, traffic source, geographical hotspots, etc.
Read: Tracking Social Media Engagement Analytics for your Live Streams
10. Repurpose your Content
If the live broadcast is over doesn’t mean your job is done. You can still do a lot with your video content, repurpose it, and use it to promote your broadcast and keep people engaged. You can plug out the most valuable points and redirect them to your audiences in the form of audio podcasts, blogs, graphics, trim video clips, transcripts, text documents, and a lot more. You can even save the video to broadcast as a pre-recorded live stream later.
Read More: Repurpose your Live Streams: Restream Old Videos for Better Audience Outreach
🔥 Wrapping Up
Promoting your live streams is an ongoing process. It begins with the pre-event phase, from creating teasers to sharing event info through email and social media marketing, the live broadcast phase, and the post-broadcast stage itself. Paying close attention to your live stream promotion can significantly facilitate you in identifying what does and what doesn’t work for you. And this will eventually help you streamline your live streaming strategy for future broadcasts.
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