Live streaming used to be the cool new thing on the Internet–it’s fun, interactive, and spontaneous, a way for people to share where they are and what they’re doing at the moment.

But it’s not just something that people do for fun nowadays. Businesses and advocacy groups alike use this type of content in their digital marketing strategy to increase engagement, boost brand awareness, and even get to know their audiences.

It’s a great way to put out great content while improving your bottom line. In fact, live streams that are placed strategically on landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80%, with 64% of Internet users more likely to purchase a product after watching a video! There’s something to think about.

So if you haven’t been “live” lately, it’s time to set up your camera and start streaming.

5 Things Live Streaming Can Do for Your Business

Let’s take a deeper look into the benefits of live streaming for business growth. Here are five main ways that this type of content can help your business:

Encourages Greater Audience Interaction

Some of the most popular platforms for live streaming are Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and Instagram Live, which have a feature that allows viewers to comment, submit reactions, and even share the stream real-time.

Live streams allow people to actively participate in discussions, which encourages audiences to engage with brands and content creators.

They also help make audiences feel seen and heard, which is a big deal online where interactions can be quite impersonal. Viewers can ask hosts questions and submit feedback, which helps make them feel that they are part of what you’re doing.

When done consistently, live streams can help audiences connect with brands more, which also builds trust and loyalty. Creators can also have a set streaming schedule, announce upcoming broadcasts on social media and affiliated sites, and use multiple streaming platforms to maximize their content and expand reach.

The more people engage with you, the better your chances of converting casual onlookers into followers, advocates, and customers.

Allows Businesses to Listen to their Audience

Another benefit to live streaming is it allows you to find out how your audiences feel about your brand, organization, or business. This means you can figure out what types of content they engage with the most and which topics they find most interesting.

This information is crucial for informing any content you develop in the future and in ensuring that it’s relevant, useful, and interesting to your target audience.

There are several ways to glean this type of information from your live streams:

• Read the comments. Pay attention to what people are saying in the comments. Are they mostly questions, signaling that people are paying attention and want to learn more? Are they comments about the quality of the audio or video? Or are there hardly any comments at all?

• Monitor your viewer count. It’s okay to have only a handful of viewers on your first stream, but that should improve over time. If your numbers are dwindling, however, it should tell you that something’s not clicking.

• Check conversations on social media. People that share your live streams will also generate an online buzz. Listen in on what people say on those interactions to get a glimpse of audience sentiment about your content.

Can Be Repurposed Into Other Content

Racking your brains for future content? If you’re live streaming, it will be much less of a burden from now on. This is because live streams are typically quite long, intensive discussions of specific topics. Basically, they are a treasure trove of content that you can break down into several sub-topics and help you generate more content.

For instance, different focus points in a live stream can be turned into blog posts, quotable quotes can be turned into catchy graphics or attention-grabbing tweets, and stream highlights can be made into video snippets.

One live stream can generate a huge bunch of content that you can plan according to the duration of a campaign and can help keep an online buzz going.

Repurposing streams into other content can also help audiences who did not view the video live get a glimpse of the discussion and even be drawn into viewing your next live stream.

Ensures Depth of Discussion and Content

Live streaming is an excellent way to create in-depth content and nurture more detailed discussions on specific topics, regardless of whether you’re a business or an advocacy group.

A great example of this is cancer advocacy campaign Hope from Within’s live streaming of an episode of Tita Hope Talks entitled “Making Cancer Care Accessible to Every Juan”. The episode was aimed at discussing how scientific innovations in cancer care should be delivered to Filipino patients.

Led by three cancer experts from different parts of the globe, it shed light on the state of cancer care in the Philippines, particularly how it fares against that in other countries. It also put a spotlight on how health advocates, medical experts, and the government all play an important role in making innovative care accessible to all.

Through the episode, Filipino patients understood their rights, as well as realized that there are much more effective treatments for cancer that can help them not only get well but continue to live their best lives in the process.

This goes to show how a live stream can help businesses as well as advocacy groups put out in-depth content that they may not as effectively tackle through other content forms, such as a short video.

Also, because of the way audiences can actively participate in the discussion, content can be made more robust through audience feedback and questions.

Builds Brand Reputation

Reputation is everything. This means how your audience perceives you matters just as much as the quality of your products and services or, if you’re championing a cause, the value of your advocacy.

Consistent, quality live streaming can also make great PR because it allows you to control the conversation about your brand, connect with your audience, and nurture customer relationships.

It’s also a great way to create buzz around your business to increase brand awareness, ignite a positive perception of your brand, and inspire loyalty from your customers.

The best way to make this happen is to partner with PR pros who can tell your story in a compelling, impactful way.

We’ve had over 25 years of success in shaping and maintaining a positive public image for businesses. We can do it for you too!

Get in touch with us, and let’s get started.