Leveraging Live Video to Build Your Business

Using live video to build your business is a smooth move. Why’s that? Well, video traffic is busy, very busy! In fact, Cisco estimates that by 2021, 82% of internet traffic will be video based – that’s a whole lot of dog vids.

But, we all know by now that video traffic isn’t just videos of people falling over and babies doing funny stuff – video content can be instructional, informative and entertaining too and the best part is that your business can use it as a growth tool.

Live video is about providing real-time, disruptive content that provides new value. It also helps that it’s a really fun way to engage with your brand’s audience and shake your digital strategy up.

You can use Periscope, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Livestream, Twitch and loads more tools to broadcast live. Facebook Live is one of the best tools you can use to start off, as you can leverage your existing business page and its audiences to reach more customers and interact with them. So, we’ll use Facebook Live as a shiny example.

Let’s look at why your business should hop on the live video train:

Take the time out of Content Creation

Obviously you can still use your budget for producing high-quality video content, but if you want quick, real-time content that means you don’t have to spend hours in an editing suite, live video is perfect.

All you need to do is hit the in-built Live Video option on Facebook and you can start broadcasting your content and popping up on your audience’s newsfeed.

There’s something really authentic about real-time content too. It’s not polished and choreographed, but it’s honest. Sometimes things might go wrong but being a bit goofy can show that your brand has a bit of personality.

Interaction made Easier

What better way to find out what your audience thinks about your new audience or what questions they have about your service than instantaneous interaction. You can figure out whether people are positive about your product and change the direction of your video if you need to.

When you share a video that you’ve slaved over for weeks, you can never be certain of your audience’s reaction and you might have made some oversights. You might end up providing minimal value, but hey, your vid looks pretty slick. With live video, you can answer questions and tailor your content towards providing maximum value. How? Because your audience can be telling you exactly what you want to know as you’re broadcasting.

Audience feedback and facilitating customer insight is super important and integral to building better products and a better user experience. You can easily see how many people are watching your live videos, their names, their comments and share your content afterwards.

Live video is the next best thing for generating Facebook engagement, aside from Facebook ads. People are spending 3x longer watching live vid than native vid, so get your thinking cap on.

Rich Brand Experience

You can really help to provide an immersive brand experience for your audiences with live video. Create a rich narrative by bringing your brand to life with employee characterization and bringing personalities on screen. This is especially important if you’re an online store – you don’t have physical stores to perform your brand personality in, so giving an insight online helps improve brand loyalty.

Basic Customer Service

When your brand’s just starting out, chances are that you don’t have a comprehensive customer service structure or a complex CRM system. So, social media is a cheap and effective way to interact with customers and deal with customer service enquiries.

Exclusive Content

One of the best ways to use live-video is to position your content as out of the ordinary. For example, you can give behind-the-scenes insight into your manufacturing process (this is great if you’re a food or drink manufacturer) or show your employees out on the road engaging with customers. Hosting interviews, broadcasting live events and launching product reveals are all effective too.

Providing content that your audience wouldn’t normally see from other competitors is always a good shout and shows you’re doing something different. Different is more memorable.

Exclusive content allows you to develop your brand identity and the personality to go with it. New, fun ideas can show your product in a different light and engage different audiences who might not have been interested before to get on board. It also helps you to attract new employee talent – someone might take a look at your business, love what they see and want to get involved.

Repurposing Content

You can give more detail about popular content you’ve shared before. Say for example you posted a really popular blog post – you can broadcast a follow-up live video to answer blog comments or questions about the original piece. Video gives you the chance to repurpose content and introduce it to new audiences that might be more stoked by video content.

A quick FAQ takes less time than individually answering all of your blog comments and lets you expand on some of the ideas in your blog.

Live Video is here to stay

Customers appreciate authentic, engaging content and live video is a great way to provide value in an off-the-cuff, honest format. Show off your personality, enhance your content strategy and build your business.