As rapid technological advancements take over the internet at full speed, live streaming has emerged as the most plausible strategy to keep your audience engaged. Meticulous preparation remains of paramount importance to take you one step closer to executing a perfect live stream. But before you go live, make sure you are well aware of the basic best practices for live streaming.
In this Article:
🔔 Promote Your Live Stream
Any content is a waste of effort and resources if it fails to reach the desired audience. The catch then is to create adequate hype about your stream well in advance to ensure that your target audience is well aware of the time when you’re going to broadcast. Announce your live stream on all your social accounts ahead of time, create events to open the floor for your first live streams officially, give sneak-peaks of what’s coming up, and show behind-the-scene set-ups to gain your audience’s attention. Get creative and optimize your efforts to achieve the most out of your streams.
So, there are three crucial questions that you must address while promoting your live stream:
- What date and time will your live stream begin? Provide the exact day and time to ensure a maximum audience.
- Where can the viewers find your live stream? Provide a link where your stream will be hosted.
- What can viewers expect from your live stream? Share the topics you’ll touch upon and advertise who all will be joining your stream.
🍿 Engage and Interact with Your Audience
Interaction is the magic potion that keeps the spirit of live streams alive. You’re not playing to a dark room or a dead audience. Make sure you interact with them enthusiastically, keep them engaged enough to maintain their interest. You can conduct interactive Q&A sessions, greet the commenters, and applaud the great commenters. The catch is to be as personable as you can.
Creating an engagement plan might do the trick. Live videos are a success because the viewers can capitalize upon the opportunity to interact with the people behind the brand. Make sure you have a solid plan for taking up the eager questions and address any possible concerns. You might want to prepare yourself by anticipating some questions and sketch through responses.
😎 Include a Call-to-Action
Keeping the audience engaged is no use if you fail to direct them to the call-to-action. Once you finish your stream, make sure to direct your audience to your streaming platforms, socials, website, e-store, etc. Since your stream and you yourself were so incredible, people would want to know what more can they gain. A quick promo might do the magic!
You are advised to be specific about what you want your viewers to do – donate to your cause, schedule a one-to-one meeting, make a purchase, subscribe to your newsletter, etc. More importantly, it would be best if you referenced this call-to-action regularly throughout your live stream. In case you don’t have a specific action in mind, tell your viewers about alternative ways to keep in touch with you, perhaps through your social networks. You can also add a link to a free download at the end of the stream, a link to another relevant informational video, or simply your email signup page. The sky is the limit!
🎬 Extend the Life of Your Live Stream
Live streaming to your socials is perhaps the golden rule to make any stream successful. This is essentially because all your target audience is located therein, and you’ll have the most effortless time building and improving future streams on these platforms.
However, your live stream must not end as the broadcast ends. Instead, it should have a long shelf life after the broadcast is over. Popular platforms will save your videos to your profile for people to watch on-demand, and that’s important. A playlist feature can come in handy herein, whereby you can save your previous live streams, queue pre-recorded videos as per your desired order, and schedule them to go live at your preferred day and time. Or, you can send out reminder/follow-up emails to your viewers and let them know that they can view it if they missed it.
Read More: Repurpose your Live Streams: Restream Old Videos for Better Audience Outreach
🎯 Select the Right Live Streaming Tool
Search the web, and you’ll be flooded with several live streaming tools. However, act wise and make sure you select the most popular yet reliable one. The tool you choose must be proficient at capturing the audience effectively, be user-friendly, and should not cost an arm and a leg. OneStream Live can act as your trusted partner, offering incredible cloud-based live streaming services to run your live streams smoothly and efficiently.
The most notable features offered by OneStream Live include the following:
- Social Media Streaming to multi-stream to over 40 social media platforms.
- OneStream Studio allows you to create a live session, add guests to live streams, and go live instantly from the browser.
- Pre-Recorded Streaming to schedule pre-recorded videos for live streaming to several social media up to 60 days in advance.
- Real-Time Streaming using any streaming tool such as Zoom, OBS, XSplit, Wirecast, etc.
- Embed Player to embed live streams on your website or anywhere you wish.
- PlayList Streaming to queue pre-recorded videos in your desired order and schedule them to go live on multiple social media streaming platforms.
- Cloud Storage Integration to facilitate importing videos directly from several cloud storages.
- Adding Captions/ Subtitles to pre-recorded live streams using SRT files.
- Custom RTMP Streaming to configure and stream to your own custom RTMP streaming destination using Server URL and Stream Key.
- Team Management to manage your team members to collaborate and live stream more efficiently.
- Mobile Apps to live stream directly from your mobile phones using OneStream Mobile Apps, available for both iOs and Android.
- Hosted Live Pages to create a personalized webpage to live stream videos on, without any external hosting requirements.
- Live Chat allows you to bring all your chat in OneStream studio and interact with the audience easily.
There are endless possibilities when it comes to live streaming. Taking care of the above live streaming best practices before your next broadcast can significantly help increase your viewership.
Read More: OneStream Live Alternatives for Live Streaming: Worth a Try or Not?
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OneStream Live is a cloud-based live streaming solution to create, schedule, and multistream professional-looking live streams across 45+ social media platforms and the web simultaneously. For content-related queries and feedback, write to us at [email protected]. You’re also welcome to Write for Us!
