What Can You Do with Live Video to Expand Its Reach?

📹 A lot of people are excited about the possibilities of using live video since the advent of #LinkedInLive and Facebook live. 📹

Recently, a friend invited me to join a group to win cool prizes from a company whose products I liked.

Freebies! Prizes! Behavioral marketing sucked me in and I signed up straight away.

Then I regretted signing up.

That’s because all the posts were live video.

The problem with live video

As a person born profoundly deaf, it’s difficult to follow live video without captions. I let my friend know.

She apologized and responded with data she picked up from a marketing seminar.

In short, the slides revealed that video was the No. 1 driver in marketing. It contained statistics on how video makes viewers more likely to buy and retain messages.

I responded with captioned video statistics:

  • OfCom has found that 80 percent of the people who use captions are not deaf or hard of hearing.
  • Facebook reports 80 percent of viewers reacted negatively to videos that automatically play with sound. This prompted some social media outlets to autoplay videos on silent.
    AdColony and Millward Brown say that captioned videos increase overall brand awareness by 19 percent.

There are more statistics, but I didn’t want to overdo it.

After I shared the information, my friend agreed. It turned out that the training later covered and recommended adding captions to videos.

The trainers said the majority of people watch videos without sound. Viewers may be in a public place where they can’t listen or they just prefer captions over sound.

Five reasons people may not watch live video

Now you know not everyone can or will watch live videos. Here are five reasons why people may miss or skip your live videos:

👉 People won’t always catch it when it’s live.

👉 Live doesn’t have captions … yet.

👉 Many don’t have their sound on.

👉 Some prefer a different format for consuming content.

👉 Viewers can’t understand the speaker.

Don’t let these reasons stop you from doing live video. You can still reach these people by recycling, reusing, and repurposing content! ♻️ ♻️ ♻️ In fact, this post is recycling content from the video at the top of the post.

One thing you can do to ease the pain

Before diving into the ways you can extend your live video’s reach, here’s one thing you can do to help users — who can’t watch the video — not feel left out.

Every social network lets you add intro text to video. Put the key points in that text.

In the freebies example, the poster could add text sharing the questions she posed, the steps to be entered for prizes, and highlighted the things we need to know.

Her intro text were teasers or didn’t say much. That kind of move can leave a bad taste in someone’s mouth.

  • Like waving a dog bone and not giving it out.
  • Like Lucy taking the football away from Charlie Brown.
  • Like a cliffhanger at the end of a TV show’s season.

Ask yourself if technical problems pop up, will this text make up for not seeing the video?

8 awesome ways to recycle, reuse, and repurpose live video

These tips apply to all kinds of digital marketing content, not just live video. Here are ideas to capitalize on your live video after it airs:

☑️ Publish a summary of the key points covered in a follow-up.

☑️ Caption the video and re-publish it as a recording.

☑️ Write a blog post or status update.

☑️ Convert it into a presentation to publish on Slideshare.

☑️ Create short captioned videos sharing bite-sized concepts.

☑️ Turn it into an email-based course.

☑️ Develop a webinar. (The presentation will help here!)

☑️ Post a Q&A on the website.

What other ways can you recycle live video? Let us know in the comments.

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