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To Livestream Or Not To Livestream? Does Your Business Really Need It?

You’re wondering if livestreaming will take off. Will it be worth the stress? Is it right for your brand? We aim to answer these questions – and more – in this guide to livestreaming and content creation in 2019.

Going live can be very effective, and not just for B2B organizations. Studies have shown people prefer live videos to prerecorded ones, watching the former three times longer.

Benefits of Livestreaming

Why is this? Basically, livestreaming is engaging and cheap, as well as very easy to produce. If that weren’t enough, your audience will probably prefer it to any other format. 82 percent of brand audiences prefer live videos to social posts, and 80 percent are less inclined to read a company’s blog than watch its live video.

Fitting Livestreaming into your Strategy

If you are sharing videos and have an apt marketing strategy for content creation in 2019 and a dominant social presence, you might be wondering if you need to stream live on top of everything. If it makes sense for your brand, it’s worth a shot, but you need a plan in place.

Livestreaming is a good idea for fashion brands. If you’re selling clothes, shoes, or accessories, having a visual could well make the difference between selling and not selling a product. People want to imagine how they’d look wearing a particular outfit or shoes.

Shoe retailer Calla saw an average conversion rate increase of 350% when switching to Bunting’s Shopcast, a new livestreaming service that enables retailers to stream from their own websites.

Measuring the Effort

There are four metrics to consider when gauging a live effort’s success: call to action responses, watch time, average minute audience, and service quality. We’ll go into each briefly below.

Call to action response is an obvious analytic to consider. Desired end results are visiting a website, connecting with social media accounts and, most importantly, buying a product.

Watch time is the time viewers spent watching your stream. This analytic can yield key findings, such as insight into the length and presentation style of future streams.

AMA or average minute audience looks at simultaneous viewership over one average minute of the live effort. This analytic can help you see which your most popular streams were.

Finally, the quality of service metric relates to the technical aspects of the presentation. These may determine whether people will keep watching or if they can watch the stream at all. Bad sound and buffering will drive everyone away.

Uses of Livestreaming

Effective uses of livestreaming include behind-the-scenes footage, product promotions, and series. The first have proven to be the most successful. People will want to watch something they don’t usually get to see, whether it’s a look inside an ultramodern factory or a tour of your new office.

Livestreaming’s advantages to product promotions shouldn’t be underestimated. If you’re a service company, you can have a live speaker during the launch of a new program. Your audience gets to ask questions directly, yielding some fruitful marketing ideas.

Samsung produces streams webinars live on a regular basis as part of its Samsung Developer Program. Within the frames of this initiative, experts cover a variety of topics aimed at teaching customers how to develop, design, and launch the apps they run on Samsung technology successfully.

Series can be crucial to content creation in 2019 because in this industry, subscribers are a key performance indicator, and livestreaming is content like any other. Many leading broadcasters have chosen a strategy where content seems like it’s part of a regular program. If your company is in software development, you could have a series with programming tips over a cup of coffee on Saturday morning.

Popular Livestreaming Platforms

Today, Facebook Live dominates the segment, but it’s far from the only platform. Among its rivals are Instagram Live, Periscope, YouTube, and Twitch.

Instagram

In 2016, Instagram launched a live video feature. Unfortunately, live videos disappear within 24 hours of being posted just like other posts on this medium. Videos uploaded on IGTV, on the other hand, stay on user channels forever.

Periscope and Twitter

Twitter bought livestreaming app Periscope prior to the latter’s launch. Twitter is still a great platform for streaming news and event coverage.

YouTube

YouTube was among the first platforms to feature live videos and has been doing so since 2011. You find out about all the interesting events as they occur on the YouTube Live homepage. You can archive your brand’s videos and repost them whenever you want.

Is Livestreaming Right for Your Brand?

Livestreaming holds huge potential for brand content creation in 2019. This marketing method can help companies increase reach and improve engagement with audiences as long as they have the resources to invest in doing it as it should be done.

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