If you’ve been live streaming for a while now but aren’t seeing any increase in your audience or sales numbers, odds are you aren’t tapping into the types of live streams that viewers crave. This article will examine some live stream ideas that you can use to increase your views and expand your brand’s reach.
Influencer Takeovers
Social media influencers are popular for a reason: they know what audiences respond to. Implementing influencer takeovers on your live stream are great ideas to attract fans of that influencer to your brand. For example, Gymshark frequently recruits fitness influencers to use their products and post about their brand. Demi Bagby, an Instagram fitness sensation with over 2 million followers, often posts about Gymshark. Her videos are very frequently featured on their page.
Audience’s love to see crossovers between brands they know and influencers they love.
Unboxing and First Impressions
Another method of drumming up audience excitement is to stream unboxing videos. This can be done by an influencer, a member of the brand, or even just a fan. Unboxing videos have increased in popularity over the last ten years by a whopping 871%. Numbers don’t lie: unboxing videos are an excellent way to increase the reach of your live streams.
Product Reviews
Product reviews rank highly among the list of popular live stream ideas. While in-depth descriptions and pictures on an e-commerce site can provide good insight into the product, a video does the job much more effectively. With product reviews, viewers can see a person handling and using the product while giving their honest feedback. Streaming a live product review lends authenticity and legitimacy to your product and, by extension, to your brand as well. Viewers love to see their product in action before they buy it.
How-To’s and Tutorials
Another excellent option on the list of live video ideas is the “how-to” video. This type of video is trendy. One video titled “iPhone 11: Complete Beginner’s Guide” received over 2 million views in 2019. Brands have been successfully using “how-to” videos for years now and are starting to recognize the benefit of doing live streaming how-to guides on various topics. Audiences love interactive videos, and “how-to’s” are about as interactive as a video can be.
Q&A’s and Ask Me Anything’s
One of the best ways to directly interact with your audience is to film a live question and answer session. This is an excellent way to reach large groups of people and feel like an intimate conversation between the brand and the consumers.
Shopping Hauls
In 2015, a video by Jaclyn Hill racked up nearly 1.5 million views as she posted her “makeup haul” from the brand Sephora. And Ms Hill is not alone in her success with posting “haul” videos. Many brands are now using hauls to show audiences all the items on sale in-store or online. An easy way to incorporate a shopping haul is to recruit a fan and post a live video of all the things they purchased from you.
Now that you have some live stream ideas, which live streaming platform are you going to use?
Best Live Streaming Services and Platforms
1. BeLive Technology
BeLive Technology is a fully customizable white-label service that develops live streaming technology for businesses. Businesses can choose to have an entire platform developed, or integrate the technology into their existing platform.
Advantages
- A wide array of features to suit businesses of all types, including live shopping.
- The features are also customizable to suit your needs in UI, UX or data acquisition.
- You will require little to no technology development knowledge as their services are end-to-end. This means that they can cover all development, design and testing stages for you.
- Great customer service to assist clients in all areas (content, marketing, design, etc).
- Offers a software development kit (SDK) option for those who prefer to do the integration themselves.
Disadvantages
- Will small-sized projects are relatively affordable, large projects can be costly due to high server costs.
2. Dacast
Dacast offers comprehensive and secure video and hosting and live streaming services where users have complete control of their content.
Advantages
- Offers key features such as an integrated paywall, analytics dashboard, and password protection.
- Competitive pricing plans.
- Add-free broadcasting
Disadvantages
- Has a very steep learning curve and requires you to have existing knowledge of integrating platforms, or have your own development team to do it for you
- Live stream features are basic and nothing out of the ordinary.
3. Bambuser
Bambuser offers live shopping technology for businesses and live streaming software development kits (SDK).
Advantages
- Large clientele consisting of well-known fashion and beauty companies.
- Option of live shopping for one-to-one or one-to-many.
- You will have full ownership of content and data.
Disadvantages
- Expensive.
- Low customization: the features and specifications are fixed and require coding knowledge to make changes.
- Requires advanced development knowledge.
4. Facebook Live
Facebook Live is commonly used by organizations who are just dipping their toes into live streaming and hoping to tap into their existing following.
Advantages
- Like YouTube, everyone knows of Facebook and how to get about the platform.
- Free to use for viewers and hosts.
- Existing social features that promotes shareability.
Disadvantages
- High latency of 20 seconds, and allows only up to 720p for video resolution.
- Extremely high competition with all the various existing content on the app.
- Lack of features and customizability
- Those who sell products on Facebook Live have to go through a manual and tedious process of stock-taking and keeping track of orders and payments.
Bottom Line
The world is continually moving toward an online model in every imaginable way. The marketing world is no exception to this digitization, and brands need to quickly pivot toward an effective live streaming strategy before it’s too late. Live stream marketing is one of the best ways to reach new and existing customers, and if you aren’t incorporating the practice now, you should strongly consider it.
Now that you have the best live streaming ideas, contact BeLive Technology for a free consultation to launch your own platform.
