How to Engage Your Audience with Live Streaming Video

As we’ve discussed in the last 2 blog posts in this series on using live streaming video (LSV) for marketing purposes, LSVs can be an ideal way to grow your fan base and make money from your content by adding all new streams of income to your business.

Once you attract your audience, paid or free, you will then need to keep them coming back for more. Engaging your audience is the name of the game. With so many distractions and content to consume, email, texts and more, it can be tough to keep them with you.

The right topic

The average length of the Top 50 most watched videos on YouTube is less than three minutes. Vine videos are 6.5 seconds long. Instagram videos can be 3 to 15 seconds long, Snapchat, 10 seconds.

You can do a lot in those seconds to grab attention, but engagement will be another matter entirely unless you pique their interest.

A good moderator

In the case of live events, be personable yourself or find someone who is, which will encourage the audience to stick with them to see more.

Lists

One way to keep them engaged is to offer lists, such as top 10s. Talk about each, give examples, and keep them hungry to get to #1.

FAQs

Frequently Asked questions position you as an expert, even as your audience wants to learn more. Let them ask you questions directly and see how long they stay online, and how often they come back for your other events.

Maintain the suspense

If you are showing how-tos, offer an introduction that tells them what you will be covering, and then remind them of what they have learned, and what they will learn if they stick with your video.

Keep it entertaining and fun

No matter what the subject, keep it entertaining and fun. Even serious subjects can be delivered in an entertaining way. Use little-known facts or brainteasers, which you give the answers to later on in the video.

Try a quiz format

Ask the questions and check to see if they know the answers. Hey, it worked for HQ Trivia…well, for a while at least!

Know your niche

As we have said previously, knowing the ëpain pointsí of the people interested in your niche and offering content on those topics is almost like reading their minds.

Educate and entertain

Webinars are a great way to highlight a product or service and show its features and benefits. Studies have shown that the average webinar attendee will watch for 54 minutes.

Make it easy to access

Don’t make them jump through a lot of hoops to see the content. Also, make sure you are using an easy, high-quality system that is reliable and fast, not unpredictable and clunky.

Use polls

Some of the streaming platforms will have engagement opportunities built right in. In other cases, you can create them through a chat box, or your Facebook page, such as a poll, while you are streaming your video through your account.

Encourage comments

Ask for comments and feedback as you go along. Hint: Organize this yourself, so you can go deeper into a topic. “Mary wants to know more about X. Well, Mary, Iím glad you asked me that”, is a typical way to set up the perception of engagement if you are nervous about live commenting when you are online. Use typical comments and questions you get most often from prospective customers.

Once you have an engaged audience, it should be one more short step to converting them from browsers into buyers. Letís look at some of the most effective ways to do this in our next blog post.

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