You’re always trying to find new ways to grow your business and make sure that what you’re doing online is working for you. In this post, we’re gonna talk about how live streaming can help you grow your business, get you more leads and engagement for your business.
As someone who’s a big advocate for using video as a pillar for all their content marketing, live streaming is a really effective and easy way for you to create that video content for you to use for all of your marketing needs.
I want to make sure that I’m giving you the best information. I turned to my StreamYard community and asked them, “Hey, business people, how are you using live streaming to grow your business online?” And here are some of the answers that they had to help you make this decision.
Authenticity
The number one glowing response seemed to be, ‘authenticity with my audience’. When you’re doing edited videos, like what you see here on YouTube, there is a specific amount of editing, text on the screen, taking away things that are not relevant to what you say.
And let’s not even get into that blooper situation. When you’re going live, you’re very much more unfiltered and unscripted, so you’re able to kind of stumble and mumble and gaffe your way through this. And it’s one of those things that’s really important for your audience.
Get personal!
Your audience wants to connect to you as a person. They want to know that you are someone that they can know, that they can trust, that they can have a relationship and a conversation with. You know, when it comes to having an authentic audience, it’s also important to make sure that you’re engaging with that audience as well.
Being able to go live isn’t just about projecting your information and leaving it at that. It’s about being able to talk with the people who are on the stream with you. People that are commenting, saying hello, asking questions, being super excited to be there. With any luck you can be asking the right questions and engaging in the right way. Conversations will just be happening organically in the chat that have absolutely nothing to do with you.
You can always have people saying “hi”, answering questions for you, and so much more. This is what is so great about live streaming, is being able to engage with your audience live. Have those conversations, comment, call people out, shout out their name.
I can’t tell you how excited people get when I’m going live, and I say, “Hey, it’s Mary, thank you so much for joining us in the chat,” or, “Oh, hey, I saw that Bob has this question here, let me pull it up onto the screen and let’s talk about it.” Those are the things that make lives so unique compared to any other kind of content. And it’s definitely worth considering when you’re trying to build a community that’s going to buy from you.
Get more exposure with Live streaming
Now, for those of us that are struggling to get seen in the very cluttered, very busy news feeds and algorithm fights and all that stuff, live streaming is actually a really great way to get that extra attention. All of the platforms, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, have their own algorithm and preferential treatment when it comes to live streaming.
It’s a totally separate part of the code that’s going to say, okay, well they’re posting stuff or there’s a video. There’s a GIF that went up. Ooh! Livestream over here. Ooh, let’s give this a little bit more attention. Who’s going to stop scrolling on the screen, Who’s going to stop their thumb scroll and see what’s happening? What alerts can we send out to your audience to let them know, hey, so-and-so is going live! It’s time to give them some much needed attention and love.
And that’s why live streaming is such a great way to really help your content plan stick out. When you go live, you get those additional boosts in your other content as well, because it’s increasing your engagement. This can also really help with things like your watch time and your retention. Facebook and YouTube very specifically want you to have more watching people, watching your content and viewing what you have.
The higher your watch time across all platforms, the more those platforms are going to help you. And the longer that someone watches you, the more YouTube and Facebook are like, yes ,this person has watched for so long. Who else is going to watch for so long? It’s also a little bit of a help for monetization reasons. The longer that your watch time is, the more you’re going to be able to reach those monetization milestones that come from Facebook and YouTube.
Accountability
Now, one of the things that I personally really love about what live streaming does is it really holds me to the fire for accountability. I have told my audience, “Hey, I’m going to be going live at this time every single week.” And I have to show up for them at that time. Like, when I put something out into the world, I really try hard to follow through on it.
When you show up regularly, when YouTube, Facebook, all the places, know they can count on you regularly to be somewhere? I cannot tell you how monumentally helpful and impactful it’s going to be for your algorithm and for your audience. This is sort of this old-school idea of media that is kind of a little bit forgotten.
I know though, when I was a kid, I used to watch TGIF every Friday, think, you know, think of this is Friday on ABC. And there was those, those two hours, those four shows I watched religiously, and I showed up and I did not leave. because I wanted to watch those.
When your audience knows you’re going to go live and what they can expect from you, it really is going to help with accountability. And again, people showing up and knowing what they can expect from you.
Repurpose your Livestream
Now, you know, I love to work smart and not hard on this channel. So when you create a live sheet, you’re basically making a long video filled with so many goodies, thought bombs, pieces of information that you can repurpose into other places. You can take your live stream and dissect it up into micro pieces of content, quote graphics, you know, Pinterest pins, blog posts, and so much more.
Your livestream isn’t just that time that you’re having this one-on-one conversation. It’s all of these other things that you can do with it. I always encourage people to try and record for the replay. So if you’re making a video like this, where you’re like, I have a very specific title and objective I’m trying to work my way through.
Maybe I’m going to record everything first, take that pause, that way I can go back and edit it out later, and then have the interaction engagement with my audience, but I can still download the full video and do more with it.
Now, if you’re wanting to know some more ways that you can be using live streaming to grow your business, maybe some ideas and things like that, watch this video I have for you right here, with my 10 ways that you can be using live streaming for your business.
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