engagement

Your brand is running your first livestream. Your live production team has got the crew, cameras and equipment all set up; but video production is only a fraction of the overall livestreaming experience. In order to deliver a true best-in-class experience, your brand needs to focus on strategies for boosting engagement among viewers during the livestream itself – in effect transforming viewers into participants.  This allows you to achieve the holy grail of extended user watch or engagement time—a key remedy for brand marketers looking to overcome the challenges of cord cutting, ad blocking and brand safety.

Maximizing engagement on a livestream relies on a savvy combination of tools and techniques, designed to ensure that your audience feels like active participants in the broadcast from start to finish. Brands can connect with their customers in a much more impactful way with engaging live content than they can with video on demand: Viewers typically watch Facebook Live streams for three times as long as prerecorded online video, Go-Globe found and attract 7 times the interactions.  The newly launched LinkedIn Live platform reports 24 times more comments and 7 times more interactions than VOD.

Here are some proven best practice strategies to drive engagement and build audience participation when running a livestreaming broadcast:

1. Create a moderated live chat within the stream
   Your livestream may have a huge global audience, but unless you build those connections, each viewer will feel like they’re on their own. Show the power of your online community by creating a real-time chat in which viewers can answer guided questions, or simply share their impressions of the onscreen activity in real-time. Live viewers want to chat, post, comment, tweet and collaborate around their participatory viewing experience.  Be careful, though: Even though the ‘social stream’ is user-generated, it will reflect back onto your brand, positively or negatively. It can be a smart strategy to use a tool that automatically filters out inappropriate content, such as offensive words and negative language about the brand, experience or content creator. These tools aggregate the conversation, but more importantly, curate the social stream. Rather than disregard or pull away from an unsavory social stream, a social stream that is completely related to live video engages viewers extending their watch time and their likelihood of sharing the experience.

2. Involve your live talent in a viewer Q&A session
   Go beyond just encouraging your viewers to discuss the broadcast with one another by producing a special on-stage or backstage interactive Q&A session dedicated for your livestream viewers. Whether your on-stage talent is answering user-submitted questions or performing a song requested by one of your viewers, building in an exclusive experience that’s just for livestream viewers will help them expand their connection with your brand.  During a Wrigley’s 5Gum-presented Coachella livestream, viewers recommended different future flavors of 5Gum to Wrigley in the social stream.

3. Expand the brand conversation to social media channels
   Include on-screen prompts to post comments or screengrabs to social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, using a branded hashtag to automatically curate the event-related discussion. This will not just keep your existing audience engaged, but promote the live event in real-time to new audiences on those massive platforms, drawing in additional viewers.  Almost every social media platform – including YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and Instagram – now offers a livestreaming solution with some level of interactivity. Brands can leverage their followings on these platforms as well as extend the live video to their social channels and invite viewers to the brand-enabled live viewing hub for a deeper, richer experience with exclusive or behind the scenes content.

4. Provide incentives for participation
   Giveaways, promos, and special discounts can be powerful incentives for fans to keep watching and to actively participate in the broadcast. For example, at the livestream of the game developer Blizzard’s conference, BlizzCon, the company provided its fans a chance to win a BlizzCon virtual ticket, a discount on goody bags, or a 20% discount on merch to viewers who logged into their Facebook accounts and watched the livestream for at least 10 minutes.  AT&T presents and live streams the LOVELOUD Festival hosted by Imagine Dragons’ Dan Reynolds, with proceeds  benefiting LGBTQ+ charities including the Trevor Project, GLAAD, The Human Rights Campaign, and Tegan and Sara Foundation.  Viewers were able to tune-in in real-time and watch performances, interviews, and talks from activists, musicians and thought leaders. The livestream included performances by multi-platinum artists Dan Reynolds, Kesha, and Teagan & Sara and offered a donation program whereby viewers could use the hashtag #turnupthelove throughout the webcast and AT&T would donate $1 per hashtagged tweet up to $200,000 to the LOVELOUD Foundation.

5. Offer live polls and quizzes
   Polls and quizzes are simple ways to keep users active on your livestreaming platform, and give them insights into how others are responding—a powerful social incentive to remain tuned in. For example, you could use a poll to give your viewers the chance to determine a winner for a competition in real-time, American Idol style. Or provide opportunities for viewers to actually influence the on-camera action: For instance, in Snickers’ 36-hour live stream, viewers were able to vote to name the saloon in the brand’s Old West-themed live Super Bowl commercial starring Adam Driver.  American Express allowed viewers to vote for an encore song in their Unstaged live concert series.  The NFL offered a live variety show at the Pro Bowl hosted by Keegan-Michael Key which allowed viewers to vote for their favorite team touchdown celebration in real-time.  Facebook Watch produced a live weekly relationship awareness show “Make Up Or Break Up” featuring an audience vote for the couple remain together or part ways using the hashtags #makeup or #breakup to be tallied at the conclusion of the livestream weekly broadcast.

6. Enable fans to set notifications for alerts during specific points of a livestream
   Most fans aren’t likely to watch an entire livestream—so make it easy for them to tune in during the parts of the show that they’ll be most interested in. If you’re broadcasting a music festival, for example, ask fans to pre-register and check off the bands they’re interested in seeing, as well as whether they’re interested in pre-show or after-show footage that’s relevant to their interests. They can then receive text messages a few minutes before the act goes on, encouraging them to tune in at the right time.

   Coca-Cola livestreamed the Vive Latino Festival in Mexico for many years.  Vive Latino is an institution in the rock scene in Latin America that has featured the top artists across the world for over 20 years.  Coke created a rich user experience that featured a branded schedule widget showcasing the nearly 80 artists appearing across six stages over two days.  The live stream broadcast 3 channels of performances for 11 ½ hours each day and allowed viewers to pre-select their favorite artist performance by day, channel and time.  Coke sent SMS reminders to those fans that had requested notifications to be sure not to miss the favorite artists’ performances, contributing to a stunning watch time average of 29 minutes per viewer on mobile and 113 minutes per viewer on desktop that saw an audience of nearly 4 million tune in.

After optimizing for engagement, how do you track how successful your efforts were? Focus on metrics such as:

• Length of time watched
• Number of social media engagements around the event hashtag
• Number and frequency of online commenters during the event
• How many people created multiple sessions during the livestream
• Concurrent live viewers

Engagement during the event should also lead into post-event engagement, so you’ll likely see many of your most engaged users stream footage on-demand after the event is over. By taking steps to ensure that your livestream audience members feel like active participants who are valued by your brand, you’ll be able to count on their ongoing loyalty and advocacy.