Blog post: How to get more engagement from your Live Streams

When you’re doing a live stream, the most important thing is to interact with your viewers. This way, they can get to know more about your brand, products and services. In this blog post, we’re sharing some tips to maximize live streaming engagement.

Live streaming is becoming an increasingly popular way for brands to connect with their audiences, market themselves, and promote specific products and launches. Today, more than 35% of marketers use live video as part of their social media strategy and this number looks set to climb higher. People want to see live streams. 82% of people prefer live video from a brand over standard social media posts. This high demand means companies who fail to employ live streaming are failing to give their audience what they want. Brands who do prioritize live streaming will find it easy to steal and engage your followers. Learn more about why this trend is so useful in this blog post. 

Yes, you can set up a business account on social channels and start live streaming there. But, there are so many constraints when it comes to using social media versus platforms that are made for live streaming specifically. The benefits are endless and incomparable. 

To summarize: Whisbi is designed for easier interaction – the platform is built for conversational sales. If you expect an enormous amount of simultaneous viewers you can split your broadcast on more concurrent channels, so that each presenter has a smaller number of viewers and can therefore answer more questions in real time. Our live video streaming solution is geared towards top of the funnel engagement, helping you drive sales. To be concrete: Whisbi’s platform lets you achieve a 3:1 return on investment, and customers are 10X more likely to buy your product(s) – using our solution. This results in a 26% increase in up-selling.

Find topics in your industry that your customers might be interested in and talk about them. It’s an easy way to gain more viewers and engage with them while also directing them to your own products. To find trending topics, just go to Twitter and find common topics that people most talk about in your industry. Another way to discover overlapping themes is to get insights from Google Trends, here you’ll find everything that’s accurate related to your area of interest. Get the conversation going!

Before your live streaming event, you should bring your audience up to speed about when it will take place and why they should tune in. Create ad campaigns to get more customers to watch the stream. Visuals play an important part in the engagement around your live stream. Communication should be aligned, the ads, the background of the stream, and any other material you want to send out regarding this stream should be in the same style so it’s recognizable for people. When preparing your visuals, be sure to include only relevant materials that add to your overall message. Use bold colors and clear fonts, but avoid having too much text in your visuals. If you are using a PowerPoint slideshow, ensure each slide only has one idea, and don’t display the same slide for more than a minute or two.

To make the most out of your live streams, it needs to be super clear for your audience when you’re streaming. Then you will reach new potential customers and you will have the ability to engage – and ultimately – sell more. To make that happen, you need to keep building your followers and promote videos among them. By creating a live streaming schedule, you can boost engagement towards your audience. Communicate your live streaming sessions to your audience and make sure to include different times. After a few sessions, analyze the metrics to see when your audience is most engaged. This helps you determine the optimal schedule for your sessions. Now it’s crucial to keep promoting your time schedule through any possible channel (homepage, email marketing, social channels, ads and more). 

Make your product or service stick in the heads of your customers, but don’t overdo it. It’s more valuable to educate or provide any kind of value to your viewers than selling your brand. If you will only focus on telling them how amazing your products are, people will drop off quickly. Instead, give them insight information they couldn’t have known before watching your live stream, and try to tell a story that keeps them engaged and most of all, entertained. You can obviously mention your brand and products, but make it interactive – do a product demonstration for example. Always answer viewer questions and demonstrate use cases so the audience will learn more and won’t leave empty handed. 

Yes, that’s a bold statement. These days live streaming isn’t something new, but it is necessary to integrate. The format generated $60 billion in sales globally in 2019 only – with China far in the lead, and only $1 billion of those sales taking place in the U.S. All e-Commerce companies are now entertainment companies. The best way for retailers to thrive is to hook customers in and get them to stay put with exceptional content. Live streams are the next natural evolution from that. 

Once you’ve streamed a few times, it’s good to analyze its performance. Many streaming platforms, like Whisbi, have analytics features built within the solution they’re offering. These metrics are extremely useful because they will give you useful insights into what worked and what you can improve. It also shows you what devices your audience uses to watch the videos, consumption per location, how long they’ve watched the live stream and much more. These insights help you create the appropriate content, identify the best timings, and determine how to engage your audience better during your upcoming live streams.