As you are reading this blog, it is clear that that you are already sold on the idea of leveraging live streaming to build your brand.
Whether you are a content creator who want to get more eyes on your content or a business owner trying to beat the competition, live streaming is a great solution for all those who want to gain more traction in this digitally connected world. If you have not yet made live streaming a key part of your business strategy, you are missing out on a lot of potential business benefits.
When it comes to broadcasting live, there is a plethora of choices out there in the market. However, you want a live streaming solution that can grow and scale with your unique requirements, has all the features you want, and that won’t break your budget.
The first and foremost choice is social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. These days’ social media streaming is becoming a necessity than a novelty. With so many live streaming platforms competing for attention, it's hard to pick one. In most cases, businesses get carried away by focusing on choosing the best live streaming app rather than on other important aspects like content, creating user engagement, increasing brand loyalty etc.
Do you really think that the choice of the live streaming app is a significant factor? Let’s find out.
Benefits of Live Streaming For Your Business
Live streaming platform is a powerful marketing tool that offers a lot of business advantages. If you are looking for different ways on how to build a live streaming website, it is important to understand about the benefits of live streaming for your business as well.
More Attention From the Target Audience
Live streaming allows you to capture more attention from your target audience as people are interested in real-time streaming than pre-recorded videos. Viewers love to see what you are offering them at the moment.
Increases Brand Loyalty
Using live streaming, you can narrate your brand story to your potential customers. The promotion of your products and services will look more captivating in real-time and that is how live videos help to increase brand loyalty.
Rich Content
Live streaming by its very nature deliver richer content to your potential customers. The content is not only rich; it is engaging as well as it is delivered in real-time.
Real-Time Engagement
How can you increase the interaction with your potential customers? Well, live streaming is the best way to do it. You can reach more audiences as you can reply to their questions, interact more with them, and all of this will have a positive effect on lead generation.
Why You Need a Live Streaming App
If you are looking for ways on how to create a live streaming website, you are on the right track. You can rely on social media platforms like Facebook, Periscope, IGTV etc. if you are just starting out. However, to deliver professional live streaming videos to your customers, it is better to look for a powerful, flexible, and customizable solution.
Flexibility To Choose Your Revenue Strategy
While some live streaming platforms like Facebook (monetization through the insertion of ad breaks) offer monetization, not every app offers this feature. In fact, even if the platform allows monetization, it might lack flexibility in various aspects.
If you have your own live streaming platform, you will have the flexibility to implement the type of revenue strategies you prefer or even use a combination of two or three revenue strategies together to create your own hybrid revenue model.
Avoid The Risk Of Unwanted Video Distributions
There is no denying that broadcasting live on Facebook and YouTube gives you worldwide exposure. But it doesn’t make your videos safe from pirates and unwanted distribution. Once your live video is uploaded to social media platforms as soon as it ends, anyone can download and reuse your videos anytime and anywhere.
These live streaming platforms doesn’t offer any advanced security cover to your videos. However, with your customized live streaming platform, you can implement advanced live security features like Geo-blocking extension based on IP address, country, or domain name to avoid unwanted usage of your videos. Choose a professional live video streaming provider who offers a secure online streaming solution for your business. This gives you more control over deciding who can view your videos and how they are being shared on the web.
Smart Analytics And Reports
When you are live streaming via YouTube or Facebook, it offers analytics and reporting about viewer demographics, retention rate, watch time, etc. However, these reports are quite basic and lack detailing. This works pretty great if you are a small business or doing it casually. Such basic data is not sufficient for a business to analyze audience behavior and interactions on an individual level. If you are seriously thinking about how to start a live streaming business, you need smart analytics and reporting, which only a customized live streaming platform can provide.
Which Live Streaming App Should You Use?
Live streaming has transformed a lot in the last 10 years. Unlike the old times when live streaming required expensive set up, today we have smart phones that can record in HD and stream over the web. The user experience is a lot better for both broadcasters and the audience.
When you consider which live streaming app to choose, all of these apps available out there are viable options depending on your requirements. The best way to figure out which one is the best for you is by trying them yourself and studying the performance. Most of the live streaming platforms in the market comes with both basic and advanced features to broaden the reach, increase engagement, and help you to monetize.
But if you ask me which is the best live streaming app that helps your business grow, implementing your own customized live streaming solution is the best bet. If you are looking for different ways on how to make your own live streaming website, look for a customized solution to tailor a more targeted approach? However, it is really not the choice of the app that is doing the trick. Instead, your engaging content does it.
The interesting fact is that most people won't remember the apps you use, but they will remember the experience you create, the value provided and the mindset shift that you implemented to make it all work.
Essential Features of a Live Streaming Platform
The competition in the area of live streaming has grown to an extent where every new player has to be creative enough to beat the competition. If you’re looking forward to creating a live streaming website, it is important to include the most important features to create your competitive advantage.
Ability to Embed Live Streaming Content
Embed live stream is a common feature that is necessary for any type of live streaming platform. The ability to add live streaming to the website after the broadcast is an essential requirement. The capability of embedding live content depends on the live streaming software provider you choose.
Sharing on Social Media Platform
Social media platforms are where the online audience engages these days. Hence it is important to share your live videos on social media networks to help to increase the reach of your content.
Attracting and engaging a broad audience on social media channels facilitates real-time conversation between the brand and audience, helping in building a strong customer-brand relationship.
If you are starting your own live streaming platform, you can implement the feature of posting your live streams directly on the Facebook feed.
Powerful CDN
Content delivery networks or CDN is a collection of distributed servers that helps to distribute the load across the network evenly. A CDN makes handling viewership spikes during your live stream effortless. It is critical to delivering your live streaming in a faster and reliable way across the world.
APIs for Integration
APIs or application programming interface helps to create customized live streaming platforms and developing on-demand applications. While choosing a video streaming software to launch your live streaming solution, look for a fully-featured API that eases integration.
Payment Gateway Integration
Integration of multiple payment methods to payment gateway is one of the essential features any live streaming platform must have to make money using live streaming app.
While building a live streaming solution for your business, choose a live streaming software that supports integration with reliable payment gateways from across the globe like PayPal, Braintree, Adyen, Stripe etc. You can also set up multiple payment gateways to cater to customers across geographies and to make your live streaming platform truly universal in terms of accepting major currencies of all countries.
Conclusion
It is true that your live streaming application must be well equipped with the features and functionalities to deliver a remarkable and quality live streaming experience to your viewers. However, the choice of your live streaming solution won’t even be noticed by your audience. At the end of the day, what matters is the experience you offer them in terms of the richness in content, engagement, and value offered through your live broadcasts. How well they felt connected with your brand counts the most. A piece of advice would be to focus less on the choice of live streaming app and more on the engagement, storytelling, and on the value that you are able to deliver with live streaming.