Promote Your Small Business With Live Video

As video becomes more important in small business marketing, live-streaming offers a compelling option to increase engagement and enhance your other social media promotional efforts.

Publishing a live video adds a personal connection that is more compelling than a recorded video, and offers the ability to increase interaction with your video’s audience during and after your live stream. In addition to offering quality live content, it’s easy to save your stream to your company’s social profiles to increase viewership and engagement over time.

Live streams are compelling enough that customers and prospects tend to watch live videos longer, and leave more comments, than most companies see in their average recorded video.

Live video also offers your small business an easy way to showcase its products and services, and potentially expand your customer base.

Although producing live streams used to be a complicated process, the fact that social platforms have built live broadcasting into their apps means it’s easy to go live with the tools you probably have on hand. Adding advanced cameras, microphones and software can improve the overall quality of a live stream, but a small business owner can get started with only their mobile device and a social media platform’s basic app.

What’s Worth Streaming?

Small businesses have a wide range of topics that can be suitable for live-streaming:

• Product demonstrations or announcements. Helping customers understand how a product works, and how it can help them, can add value to your sales process.
• Q&A sessions with customers and prospects. Being able to explain the benefits of your products and services helps demonstrate your expertise and highlights those benefits to your audience.
• Behind-the-scenes looks at your company. People enjoy watching how you do what you do and learning about your team members.
• Live events. This can be highlights of a community event or an industry conference.
• Discussing industry news or trends. This can help you start a discussion that also helps highlight your expertise.

Getting Started

If the benefits of live-streaming seem attractive to you, a little bit of advance planning can help you maximize the potential benefits. Consider the following:

• Outline your message. While you don’t want to create and read an actual script, listing a few bullet points will help you keep your thoughts and comments on track during the live stream.
• Test your software and equipment. Although streaming software is relatively straightforward, it’s a good idea to produce a couple of private streams so you’ll be comfortable with the process before you have an audience.
• Schedule and promote your video. Scheduling a video a few days ahead of time, and creating a short video announcing it, will help increase attendance and engagement.
• Consider a routine. After you’ve done a few live streams, producing them on a consistent basis will further help you develop an audience.

During the stream, audience members will have the opportunity to interact with you via the platform’s chat features. This is a great forum for answering questions and increasing engagement. If you have a large audience, enlisting a colleague to monitor the chat and relay questions and comments can help you focus on your content.

With a little practice and experience, live-streaming can be a valuable part of your social media marketing efforts.