What Is Live Video Streaming?
Live video streaming means communicating with your audience in real time. A quick history lesson here: Live streaming became a big social media marketing tool popular with influencers, gamers and musicians whose audiences tuned in on sites like YouTube, Facebook Live and Twitch. These platforms grew for those who yearned to be stars—if only for a moment.
Covid changed everything, of course. When our in-person venues closed down, we turned to the Internet. We learned that we could do everything virtually—get married, meet our friends for drinks and talk to our shrinks. Live streaming video became another in-real-life place to see and be seen.
But live video isn’t just for informal social media and low-key Zoom meetings.
Here are some benefits of live streaming video and how it can help you grow your business:
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Realize your full social potential. Put your streaming video to work.
Simulcast to your social media accounts.Live-streaming video posts on your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts receive more engagement than posts with still images. What is engagement? It’s when people start liking, sharing and commenting on your posts. When people start engaging, it gets your post in front of more people, it starts to grow your reach and your brand.
Social is more than the old standbys of Facebook, Instagram and X. There are other social media sites, including LinkedIn, Twitch; WT.Social; or MeWe, with its 20 million+ users. Be alert to what’s happening with X—many people think that as the application continues to fall from favor, more users will continue to migrate to other platforms. Mastodon is currently the most X-like and it’s growing in popularity. Hopefully Mastadon will not go the way of the Wooly Mammoth.
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Live streaming for business: Reaching a younger demographic
Nearly 15 percent of millennials spend from 10 to 20 hours/week watching videos. This is a generation that lives online, joined indelibly with their phones. And we need to understand that a good portion of that time is spent watching videos. If your business is selling to millennials—or would like to be selling to millennials–a good way to reach them is with video.
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Boost your search engine optimization (SEO)
We know that search engines like Google index content when it’s published. It’s up to us to make it easy for Google to find and index it, using H tags for our headings and subheads, and structured data. But Google looks beyond text when indexing a web page. It looks for images, which is why we create alt tags and have learned to label our images to make them more visible. Google also loves video. If your social media videos generate a stream of website visitors, your site will rank higher—especially if those visitors stay and drill down through your website. Make it easier by creating an inner linking strategy to showcase your streaming-video links. According to Eye View Digital, using videos on a landing page can increase conversions by a whopping 86%.
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Building trust with live streaming for business
Whether you’re sharing your expertise or moderating a webinar or panel discussion, with live streaming they’re more likely to remember your company. Offer something unique and be authentic. Live streaming is an effective tool for building trust.
But we’re an impatient bunch, ready to click and move on
How do we capture the attention of our potential customer long enough to build that trust? Live streaming may not be the same as a one-one encounter, but it provides user access to more of our personality and experience than text or still photos. It’s easier to engage with live stream, to feel like we’re part of a conversation. Remember that we’re courting our customers, establishing intent and moving our customers down the sales funnel, and it starts with that initial engagement.
Nurture existing relationships
Videos are a tool, just like your website, your blog, newsletter and social media channels. Use streaming in the same way you now use these channels to welcome new members of your team during the onboarding process. If you’re reaching out to new customers to thank them, do this with your videos as well. Introduce your sales team. Or what about introducing your back-office team who makes all of this happen? Be inventive. Think of creative ways to stay in front of your customers with a streaming personal greeting.
Stay top of mind and keep your customers engaged
The number of people working from their home offices has exploded. While the virtual model is efficient, it keeps us off the roads and saves us hours of commute time, it’s also isolating. Live streaming helps bring us closer and stay connected to both our internal teams and customers. Live-streaming video helps provide a sense of immediacy that can be missing from other communication channels.
Think about this: You’re curating your customers
Because live videos happen on your schedule, you’re selecting your customers. Only those customers who are interested in you and your services at that particular time will make the time to attend your hybrid live-streaming events. Once you’ve begun curating an audience, you’ll gain confidence, knowing that you’ve managed the hardest part of the process.
You’re using streaming video to build quality backlinks
Video helps increase your rankings. When users link to your site, they’re creating backlinks, and Google interprets these backlinks as a sign of quality. No one would go there unless there was a reason, right? These links are part of building your Google authority. The more links, the higher your Google authority, and your ranking will continue to improve.
Live streaming for business goes a long way towards getting your potential customers invested in your services. Research shows that people are more likely to engage with video posts than with either text or video posts.
According to Statista, the value of the live streaming industry is expected to be valued at more than $330 billion by 2030.
- 59% of executives would rather watch video than read text.
- 86% of businesses use live streaming as a marketing tool.
- 88% of people would like to see more video from brands.
Make sure you’re providing high-quality content that provides value—not just checking off a line item in your marketing plan. A live-stream campaign can contribute a strong message about a company and its team in action.
A quick look at live streaming and the global ecommerce industry
According to research conducted on behalf of TikTok, more than 52 percent of global users would be interested in consuming live branded content. Live stream shopping was popular in China before Covid. But remember that China was hit especially hard by the pandemic. The whole country was quarantined and people couldn’t leave their homes. Being cooped up for long periods of time, it’s not surprising that ecommerce shopping exploded. Sales through TikTok and Douyin are projected to account for 30% of the total value of goods sold online in China by 2025.
Other countries began to take note . . .
China’s shopping phenomenon grabbed the attention of retailers around the world. Europe’s live-stream shopping topped that of the Middle East or Asia. According to Oberlo, the current global ecommerce growth rate is forecast at over 8%, bringing global ecommerce sales worldwide to over $6.5 trillion. According to Shopify, global ecommerce sales are expected to surpass 8 trillion by 2028.
South America also has experienced a surge in live-stream shopping, and one in ten Brazilians had attended a live stream shopping session.
Live-stream shopping experience: They love to buy now and pay later
Live-stream shopping allowed vendors to showcase their products and interact with customers, pioneering a new way of doing business. Global retail companies liked live streaming because they could deliver a better shopping experience, improve customer engagement and accessibility. They learned that live streaming is a great tool for sharing company highlights. Here in the US, viewers loved the “buy now, pay later” approach.
Conclusion: Live-streaming video–a versatile marketing tool
Live-streaming video has grown up and become an important marketing tool for business. Think product releases, organizational changes and welcoming new team members. Live streaming is ideal for webinars, Q&As and announcing upcoming events. For internal teams, it’s the perfect platform for new product training. The video can be auto-saved to YouTube and/or archived so that team members can view it on their own schedules. There’s a reason why live video streaming is becoming a standard part of marketing programs—it’s accessible, cost effective and it helps grow your business.
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