Ask Me Anything: Live Streaming & Inbound Marketing

[PaulRichards]

Hi HubSpot Community,

My name is Paul Richards. I am the Chief Streaming Officer at the StreamGeeks. I specialize in live streaming on social media. I am here to answer your questions about live streaming and video production. We’ll leave the tech questions to the HubSpot experts, but you can ask me anything about live streaming best practices or perhaps something you have read about or seen on our show. I will be answering questions through this community forum.

Need some suggestions for what to ask? Here are some example questions:

• How do you live stream to both YouTube and Facebook at the same time? Should I just focus on one platform at a time? 

• How do you manage to insert call to actions images into your live broadcasts? 

• How do you grow an audience to watch your live stream? 

Look forward to hearing from you soon! By the way, here is the live stream link from our HubSpot/StreamGeeks Live Collaboration. 

[davidodonnell]

Hi Paul,

Personally am curious to know the answers to some of your example questions:

• Should I just focus on one platform at a time? (vs. multistream)

• How do you add CTAs to live streams?

Thanks!

[JohnNiggl]

Hi @PaulRichards,

My question is less related to streaming and more to videos as a content medium in general. But I'll ask anyway...

Can you discuss the pros and cons of these different video hosting platforms/channels and maybe describe how each may be better suited for some types of video than others?

1. Youtube

2. Wistia

3. Vimeo

[PaulRichards]

Hi John,

I would start by explaining the difference between YouTube and Facebook. I call Facebook and YouTube, the Red and Blue giants because they have the majority of the internets users. The big difference here is that Facebook is a social media network and YouTube is a search is a search engine. So Facebook get's much more immediate attention and potentially more views in the short team. If your content is "shareable" you could see some really great organic reach and the demographics for targetted advertising are great. On YouTube, people usually find your videos because they are searching for them. So we find that people watch much longer and the inbound leads are generally of higher quality. YouTube also has a much longer shelf life for the videos since people may be searching for your video years from now. Whereas on Facebook, it's like a short burst of lightning and then it fades away. 

Vimeo and Wistia are doing some very interesting things that stand out in the video space. In general, they don't have nearly the same reach so they work for specialized applications. I love the way Wistia offers HubSpot integration and integrated CTAs. But Wistia will never offer you the same reach as Facebook or YouTube. Vimeo is starting to do some really cool things with live streaming allows broadcasters the ability to monetize their events and include paywall. 

In conclusion, I would suggest posting your videos where your audience is. Don't expect them to come to your website. Always use native video to the platform. Don't share a YouTube video on Facebook. Post the organic to Facebook and you will see it perform 10X better 🙂

[jennysowyrda]

Hi @PaulRichards, 

Thanks for kicking off this AMA! One question I have in regards to live streaming is how can video content and live streams be utilized in conjunction with a greater marketing campaign? Is it best to have live streams as seperate campaigns that you focus on growing audiences for, or can they be used to supplement an ongoing marketing campaign? 

Also, wanted to pull some other Community users into the conversation who might be interested in this topic: @BrandManager_IL, @USC-Steve, @JohnNiggl, @clinedesigneric, @MiaPV, & @tpSignal88 . 

Thanks, Paul! 

[PaulRichards]

That's a very good questions. 

If you are just getting started with live streaming it can seem like you have to a lot of audience building to do in the beginning. We have found that inviting the right target personas to our live streams makes it easier for us to build up an audience of live viewers. Even small groups of 5-10 people can be enough to get an engaging conversation going in your chat room. It's the engagement and viewer retention that Facebook and YouTube use to determine if the content may be interesting to others on the platform. 

I would use HubSpot marketing with Call To Actions right inside every live stream as a content upgrade or a pathway into your CRM. I think that it could very effective to add live streaming into an ongoing marketing campaign. Using inbond marketing to grow an audience for your live show will put you light years ahead of the competition out there 🙂 The live viewer engagement may even help marketers come up with new ideas for the campaign.

[AllisonAltus]

Is it possible to autoplay two videos on a page? I have only one video autoplaying. Ideally i would like them both to loop and autoplay?

Any help much appreciated - oh and i am very new to using CSS code.

Thanks

Allison