Live streaming on YouTube, Facebook, Periscope, and other platforms is a great way to engage your audience! You can interact in ways you can’t interact with pre-recorded and posted videos. Benji has done a lot of live streaming events and interaction with viewers. He shares his advice and tips on how to best engage your viewers and your audience in a livestream.

Session Time

The number one thing about live streaming is the session time. How long can you capture people’s attention? Right. Like the viewing session. People are just watching for a lot longer than the average video.

Live Session Notifications

Secondly, platforms want you to live stream so they’re really pushing it. Like Facebook, for example, how many times you’ll go to your Facebook feed and see somebody’s live session?I get notifications on my phone about it. I thought I disabled notifications.  It’s like they’re artificially pushing it in front of people.

They want people to be using live because it keeps them on their platform longer, which is good for serving adds and just in general for the website. And then that’s the other thing too.

Engaging Your Audience

Live Streaming is the best way to engage because it’s like a real time conversation, and even if you can’t engage with a real-time single person, the fact that you may reply to a comment or a question is very powerful.

Especially live. They’re like, “he saw that person in the chat room. He probably sees me too”. So very, very engaging. And there’s like an unknown element, like, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Tim’s kids could go crazy. And they have gone crazy live before. And then you stop the live stream. And people are like, I saw that. You couldn’t edit that out.

So what difference does it make as far as your audience development, the relationship that you’re building? I know that you can get people to engage a lot better. But does that do anything for them too?

Yeah. I mean you know this is the thing. Like with a regular video, you can leave a comment, and they could reply back, right? That’s powerful.

Yeah, on Twitter, somebody could @ reply you, and you can reply back. Again, very powerful, people really value that. But when it’s live, it’s like a conversation. And that is building not only the relationship, but it’s building trust. And if you talked about the number one value that an influencer has whether on YouTube, Facebook, or any platform, it’s the trust. And there’s nothing that beats live when it comes to that.

So how do you get people to your live stream in the first place? How do you get them to know about it and all that kind of stuff?

Well, you know this is a great thing like Facebook, for example. They are artificially putting it out there to people, right? So you just simply go to your posting, go to posts like a picture or video, there’s a little button that says, go live or live feed, right? That’s really easy. On YouTube, you actually have to go into the Hangouts area and create a broadcast. However, YouTube is going to be rolling out a mobile app soon. I don’t even know if I’m supposed to be talking about it.

How to get your people there. Especially for people that have no influence, right? Facebook, on my personal Facebook, my friends that are using live, so you can use that just has a regular person, their live broadcast is getting at the top of my feed. So even if you have no influence yet for your channel whatever, use it for your personal Facebook account to start getting the word out there.

Links

You can actually use hyperlink, right, or the URL to put it on to social media and spread it that way as well.

Text Messaging List

Yeah, a couple of other things that I do with my YouTube streams, guys, I have a text messaging list, number one. Where I get people, you can text the word VC Live to the number 43506. And it doesn’t cost you anything or them. And you guys can join a text messaging list. So I send out a mass text message. I schedule it from when we go live, put the YouTube or URL in there, and they can just join us. That’s one way you can do it. You can email list. You can promote it to your email list.

Promoting Through YouTube

A third thing though that a lot of people don’t do is actually when you set up your live stream on YouTube under the Advanced tab, there’s an option about halfway down on the left side that you can set your live stream to be promoted across all other videos on your channel either like an hour before, only when you’re live, two days before. So let’s say you set it to two days before, everyone who’s watching a video anywhere on your channel at any time before two days before you go live, they’ll get like this little slide out thing that says, like, hey this person’s got a live stream coming up. And they can go then to your live stream and click the Set Reminder button which is very clear right there.

And then they’ll get an email notification. If they have desktop notifications enabled for YouTube on like Chrome browser, they’ll get a notification. And you can notify people that way right when you go live. And you can kind of build that momentum across by using like all of your other videos to kind of like promotion for it.

If you want more information about Benji or his channel, Video Influencers, check out Video Influencers.

Text VCLIVE to 43506 to get a notification when I live stream here on Video Creators! Or, signup here.
(Thanks to http://txtsignal.com for supplying the texting account!)

– YouTube’s suggestions for promoting your Live stream
– Feature your live stream across other videos on your channel