LinkedIn Live Events: Streaming on Social Media

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If you’ve been on social media recently, odds are you’ve seen someone or some brand (maybe even us!) hosting live events. More and more brands are jumping on the virtual event bandwagon for many reasons—they demonstrate authority, increase reach, and build trust, just to name a few.

Going live on social media can be daunting if public speaking isn’t your thing. We assure you it’s worth it–for your brand’s awareness and professional development. And we wouldn’t be talking about it if we weren’t doing it ourselves.

Where to Start

If you’re planning live events on social media, consider these things beforehand:

1. What platforms is your brand most popular on? Who are you trying to reach? We prioritize our live streams on LinkedIn because we’re focused on B2B. However, we plan to stream to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube soon to maximize our reach.

2. What topics and conversations are relevant to your audience? Plan and outline your topics. Conversations without direction and intent often come across as chaotic and unorganized.

3. What’s your bandwidth? How often do you want to plan live events? A one-off won’t reap results, but too frequently can oversaturate and annoy your market—not to mention burn through every idea you have too quickly.

4. Do you want to establish a cadence? We do live events as a team on our Founder’s LinkedIn weekly on Tuesdays at 10 AM and once monthly on our brand page on the third Thursday at 1 PM. Repetition keeps you accountable, is easy to remember, and becomes familiar to audiences.

5. What do you hope to accomplish from your efforts? Higher reach? Have you increased credibility or brand awareness? Set goals, track progress, and adjust as needed.

How to Start

We’ll speak from experience—Streamyard is the way to go. It’s a streaming service that event speakers use together virtually. It simultaneously connects to your social media platforms of choice and live streams to each of them.

Within Streamyard, you can present decks, enable hovering banners for advertising, respond to comments on social channels, and more. Are there more streaming platforms like it? Sure. But in terms of what we recommend, Streamyard rules.

Why Should You Care?

Live events on social media offer all kinds of benefits.

First, live streams reach users beyond those who follow you or your brand. Events relevant to user interests show up in their feeds. This is a win-win when it comes to algorithm effectiveness because it puts helpful, valuable content in the hands of social media users AND connects your scheduled live event details to the right demographic.

What’s better is that once the live stream ends, your live event will be posted on your brand’s page as video content. It will then become regular content that you can continue to promote, turn into a blog post, and revisit time and time again.

Live events are also effective in boosting authority and credibility. They’re an opportunity to demonstrate in real time how knowledgeable you and your team are about what you do. There are no do-overs when you go live, meaning the content is more authentic, less rehearsed, and more impressive to audience members.

Ultimately, the interactive nature and humanization paired with critical information your brand has to share are the bread and butter of live events. Are you interested in giving them a try? We help our clients plan, prepare, execute, and curate live events ALL THE TIME. We can help you, too!