Better Live than Perfect: Growing Your Brand With Livestreaming

It has often been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. If this is true, one could only assume that video—which is essentially thousands of pictures quickly presented in a row—must be worth millions of words.

The effectiveness of video is indisputable. Video provides consumers with both visual and audio media, distributed over time. It is the most engaging, most detailed, and most comprehensive form of media available—when properly utilized, video can create a lasting impression and even motivate people to take specific action (such as making an investment).

Social media is a place where organic and original video content can thrive. On various social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube, users can advance and express themselves in an authentic way. In fact, due to these platforms’ unique design and setting, social media users are often much more responsive to new video content than individuals watching commercials on television.

However, even keeping these apparent—and important—facts in mind, it is clear that some videos will inevitably be better than others. Below, we’ll discuss a few of the most crucial things to keep in mind when creating social media videos.

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Don’t be afraid to go live

Creating (truly) live video can be incredibly intimidating because as soon as you have said something, there is no way for you to take it back. The possibility of a slip up, a mistake, or a gaffe is something that can be daunting to many people active on social media, so much so that some will choose to forego creating live content altogether.

Even keeping these things in mind, there are myriad benefits that can come from going live that simply cannot replicated in any other way. To begin with, live video can be very humanizing, which is even more important for people (such as syndicate sponsors) who have never had an in-person, human interaction with the very people they are marketing to. Going live provides limitless potential for authenticity and even if your live stream isn’t perfect, it is real—something that most people think is even better.

Keep things short and sweet

 When creating video content, it can be very tempting to ramble on and keep your streams going. After all, once your audience is captive, you’ll naturally want to keep them captivated for as long as you possibly can. However, when it comes to livestreaming on social media, its better to keep things short and sweet, rather than long and exhaustive. In fact, this is precisely how platforms like TikTok and Snapchat have been able to generate such immense levels of global popularity.

When livestreaming, on LinkedIn, for example, you’ll typically want to limit your message to about the length of a song you’d hear on the radio (two to four minutes). This gives you a chance to share an idea, to briefly discuss this idea, but to leave your captive audience interested and looking for more. If you want to create a half hour podcast or instructional video, YouTube is probably a much more appropriate platform than LinkedIn or Facebook. The point of these streams is not to comprehensively finish the conversation, but to start a conversation and make it easy for your interested audience to discover more.

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Find your editing “sweet spot”

In some cases, your live videos might be filmed live, but will then have some small amounts of editing before they are actually posted. While these videos won’t necessarily have the same impact as a bona fide livestream, they can still offer the sense of humanness and authenticity that audiences of all kinds crave.

In these situations, it will be crucial for you to find your editing “sweet spot.” Generally speaking, this means editing your videos in a way that will enhance their value without losing any of your original authenticity.

One of the most important things you can do to improve your video posts to add captions. Not only does this make your videos accessible to individuals that are hearing-impaired (which consequently increases your Google performance), but it also makes the videos accessible to the many people that use their computer or smartphone with the sound turned off.

Beyond captions, incorporating a brief intro or outro can also help add a bit of useful context. As long as your videos are capable of still expressing the real you, still delivering a useful message to your audience, and still compatible with your current brand image, you will be moving in the right direction.

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.