Here’s how to livestream your way into your customer’s heart

VIDEO-SHARING giant YouTube has announced updates to its livestreaming service giving you more options to engage with your audience.

Many businesses are realizing the true potential of live video content in connecting with their audiences.

With the rapid growth in popularity of apps such as Snapchat, many brands have jumped onto the live streaming bandwagon in order to create a better brand experience.

With livestreaming, all you need to connect with your audience is the simple push of a button.

It allows you to interact with your audience in a refreshing, real, warts-and-all approach; breaking down barriers and creating a connection that transcends traditional marketing limitations.

Consumers today crave authenticity from brands, and whats more genuine than a live video? Today the attention spans of consumers are rapidly decreasing in today’s digitally-connected world.

According to a Microsoft study, we now have an attention span of eight seconds (shorter than a goldfish)! Fortunately, live video seeks to please our goldfish tendencies, by interacting with us effortlessly.

Businesses are using the power of live video to bond with their customers by sharing tips, opinions, and offering exclusive behind the scenes tours and previews.

YouTube’s updates to captions

Livestream videos will have the option to enable automatic English captions powered by live automatic speech recognition technology.

If your small business simply does not have the budget to splash out on a professional caption service, then this is a great feature to make your live-streams more accessible to your audience, particularly for those who are hearing impaired.

This automated caption feature is also great considering the number of silent videos being served on social media. According to DigiDay, a whopping 85 percent of content is watched without sound.

Chat replay

Another new feature includes the launch of “chat replay”, where live chats from your audience that took place during a broadcast will show up alongside a video replay exactly as and where they first appeared.

Geo-tagging capabilities

You can now also add location tags to your live streaming video content. This provides greater transparency to your audience, allowing them to see where the event is taking place.

YouTube introduced its live streaming feature last February to creators with 10,000 subscribers.

In April of last year, the site dropped that number to 1,000, opening up its live-stream function to more of its creator-base, and providing smaller businesses with a platform to connect with their audience.

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