The benefits of live streaming on social media for your brand

Live streaming is fundamentally a technology that makes your message reach more users. Think of what the radio, television, or loudspeaker did for society and what they did for commercialization more specifically. That’s what live streaming is doing for the new generation of consumers. Brands who figure this out and adapt to it early will have an edge over other brands.

Essential for building brands

This marketing method is built on the back of information technology, which has diminishing costs, accelerating performance, and exponential market penetration. Ten years ago live streaming was a viable option for early-adopter brands to use. They would connect to their user base who were all watching via their desktop computers.

Now video live streaming is nearly essential for building brands. Live streaming is more integrated and easier to arrange than ever before, and your audience can connect via mobile phones, which now offer more media performance than the desktops of ten years ago did.

A livestream can cost zero dollars, and potentially reach millions of potential customers. It integrates seamlessly with multiple hardware platforms. It works with different media platforms as well, such as YouTube Live, Facebook Live, and even LinkedIn. This is a massive opportunity for brand exposure that has costs that approach zero. It’s only going to get better and easier over time, as well.

Direct engagement

Live streaming across social media platforms is a direct and personal connection to each individual audience member. When audience members use their social media space to view your content, it is the digital equivalent of bringing you into their home.

This is where they engage with their family and friends, tell jokes, and share opinions. Putting your brand adjacent to where each individual audience member lives out the majority of their personal digital lives is considerably powerful.

A live stream across social media is not only that though. Imagine if at an Apple keynote event every audience member somehow got a front row seat. Through live chat and other participatory tools that you may have in your livestream, there is the sense that there is a crowd watching as well.

But almost paradoxically with high quality audio and video, it feels as though the engagement is much more direct or personal for each audience member.

Audience management

Live streamed events are unique in how well the event organizers can manage the audience. Depending on how the livestream is set up, moderators can assist the hosts in screening the best questions from the audience before they are asked. This ensures the most productive Q&A sessions in any presentation platform.

In true live events the behavior of the audience is not fully controlled like it can be in livestreams and webinars. Live broadcasted events don’t have to worry about heckling from the online audience the same way staged events with physically present audiences do.

Live streaming software offers more control, but no less spontaneity in their presentation.

Strong sales conversions

Live streamed events can provide better sales conversions than other event types. Especially businesses that offer eCommerce products or services can profit from live streams. It is easy to integrate promotional offers with your live streamed event, which can instantly generate large numbers of sales.

Apart from this, Broadcasting live can also be used in content marketing as a valuable tool along the buyer’s journey. It allows you to create new business opportunities by connecting with your audience in a new way.

Value that persists

Your best moments can happen at any time. What if you always had every presentation recorded in high quality video and could easily edit and re-use these captured moments for sales and other promotional materials?

It may be good to have a really great turnout, but what if you could guarantee that everyone who ever would want to see your event could make it and experience it the same way everyone else did?

Using live video through streaming software allows for easy recapturing of all the events that occurred during that livestream. All the great moments that can and do happen live in spontaneous situations are there in full fidelity for the ages.

The ability to do more than just get a feel for your audience

Live streaming generates a ton of valuable market data about your audience and your performance that you can’t normally measure quite so easily. In a live streamed event you may easily integrate communication channels directly to your audience that would be costly or almost impossible to pull off in any other way, such as real-time opinion polls and true viewer engagement stats.

At a live event, half your audience could be sitting there but bored and you would have no real idea of quantifying that. But in livestreamed broadcasts, viewers’ attention spans are much more noticable. It may be that you could have questions like:

• Were there more viewers at the beginning of my presentation than throughout the end? If so by how much?
• When people go back and re-watch my presentation, what parts do they look for?
• What are the sentiments about my presentation?

These features that are unique to live streaming can give you crucial feedback in concisely how your audience feels about how you are doing that no other method of presentation can easily do.

You want to to go live with your brand? Learn more about how to live stream to Facebook & YouTube in our blog article here.