Third Team MediaWhy You Should Include Live Streaming In Your Social Media Plan
If there’s one thing that you as a marketer cannot avoid in 2014, it is that social media is an increasingly important part of your events—from creating Facebook events to coming up with trendy hashtags to participating in online communities to producing clever countdown posts to live tweeting updates, among others.
For many online users, tuning in on real-time conversations about your event is as natural as turning on the television. This means that while your event is happening, social media coverage by someone else is happening on real time, too, whether you like it or not.
For a long time, Twitter has been considered a reliable platform for real-time conversations simultaneously happening with live events. Take a look at the Super Bowl, for instance. It recorded around 13.7 million related tweets in 2012, which is a far cry from the 24.1 million tweets recorded in 2013. It’s definitely a lot of data to sift through.
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The beautiful thing about social media is the availability of tools, improved over time, which marketers can break in and explore. Live tweeting updates may still be effective today but have you considered live streaming your events? With the strengthening position of Google+ as a social network, marketers are encouraged to figure out how it can integrate this platform into their digital marketing plans. Inevitably, Google will be everywhere!
One of the tools marketers can take a sober look at is Hangouts on Air at Google+, which is merged with Youtube. With Youtube being such a user-friendly site, Google Hangouts on Air, a free video chat and live streaming service, has the potential to grow. Many business owners have already testified how this tool has increased its overhead costs, boosted client relationships through face-to-face communication and significantly promoted their events, such as concerts and webinars, through live streaming.
Live streaming allows users to view and broadcast video content using a camera and a computer through the Internet. It allows marketers to generate a bigger audience, more than those you expected to attend your events physically, and consequently, generate bigger revenues, too. By streaming your event live, you are creating a sense of urgency, rarity and significance to people who see it during the given time, encouraging more high quality online interaction. All of these combined and successfully executed, you can have future clients rapping at your door.
Before Hangouts on Air at Google+ entered the realm of live streaming, there are already strong incumbents, such as Ustream. Both tools have the same advantages—they are free, with social media integration and quality streaming. However, upon a second round of scrutiny, Google has an online community of social curators that could easily thrust Youtube into becoming the leading live streaming platform online, not just a stage where you can view videos, comment on them and share them.This is a game-changing notion. You know that Youtube is where billions of videos are viewed weekly on a global scale. If you introduce a reliable live streaming platform to an existing, open-minded and adventurous community, it is only a matter of time before millions will include live streaming and video-based group chats on Youtube as a regular part of their social media diet.