A recent report by Nielsen claims that social media influences TV viewing decisions, with a surge in viewers tuning into any given programme following social media conversations around it.

There is no denying that social media now has an influence on a whole host of decisions in our everyday lives, from what to watch, where to go, to inspiring us to get active after viewing our friends posts about running several miles.

It stands to reason therefore that integrating social media into your video marketing and integrating live streaming directly into social media platforms if done well can make a real difference to both engagement and audience figures.

Using social media to promote your online video

In the same way that social media can drive viewers to TV programmes it can be used to drive audiences to live streaming. Not only can recommendation be a powerful tool to drive traffic through social but it also fundamentally changes the type of devices used to view the content. People viewing social media on mobile devices are more likely to view the streaming video they are referred to on mobile devices so the way in which the video is streamed has to be adjusted to accommodate this.

Advantages of streaming through a social network

Streaming via Facebook, YouTube or Twitter gives any campaign a number of advantages.

First you need to do a lot of work making an audience aware of an upcoming webcast and obviously social media can help spread the word. However by integrating the webcast onto a social media platform rather than asking viewers to go to a different website to watch, you can make the proposition, and therefore the user journey, a lot simpler. For example you can say to the user, ‘You are currently on Facebook, would you like to watch this?’ rather than asking them to go somewhere else to engage. This shorter simpler user journey leads to a more engaged and longer viewing user.

In the last year all of the content we have streamed over Facebook has had a viewing time in excess of 25 minutes.

Second by making the streams and applications work on as many devices as possible you allow an audience who are on the social network on their mobile devices to view and interact via those same devices. This encourages sharing with friends and so expands the range and audience for the stream. A well promoted Twitter event can have 1/3 of its audience viewing on mobile compared to an average of around 10% for a device not promoted through social.

Third, the audience is a lot less likely to be passive with social streaming, more likely to ask questions, take part in polls and generally interact. If harnessed correctly this information can be used to better shape the content of the programme around the audience’s response. This can be seen in content which changes the discussion based on polls or answers to viewer questions.

Return on Investment

The success or failure of a live stream must be based around solid metrics and a clear understanding of where the value is in doing the event. This can be comprised of a whole range of factors such as viewing times, number of viewers, number of interactions, change in viewers opinion, direct sales post live stream.

However there are additional metrics social media can provide you with, number of retweets, number of likes, number of shares etc. and these in some cases are as valid as the number of viewers and in some cases more so, as this helps build an audience to market further content to. The key questions should always be ‘what do we want them to do next?’ and ‘how do we measure that they have?’

The road to success

The companies and agencies which will truly succeed in their combined use of social media and live video content will be those that understand how the user wants to be engaged and uses both media to facilitate that interaction. They will also be those people who respond to the audience feedback and tailor the content to their requirements of the fly.

Get this right and the rewards can be significant with an engaged audience, willing to reward those giving them the content they want to engage with.