How to Record Your Next Livestream

The concept of streaming, and more specifically, livestreaming, is hitting its stride across a broad segment of businesses and industries. It's a huge plus for marketing departments.

No longer bound by the realm of simple user to user interaction, your brand's livestream activity is a critical engagement point for an audience searching for new content.

Let's explore the benefits of livestreaming, why you need to record them, and most importantly, how to record live streaming videos.

Benefits of Livestreaming

Suppose you've ever participated in a video conference or attended a professional webcast, or some other live web-based gathering. In that case, you're already aware of the personal benefits of a live-streamed event. From education to entertainment to personal enrichment, your brand's target audience is after the same experience.

Beyond personal fulfillment, for a business, the most significant advantage to livestreaming is bringing together a vast audience regardless of time and place. But recording a livestream is more than just the immediacy of the event itself. It carries far-reaching benefits for ensuring your brand's success.

Expand Your Reach

At its most basic function, livestreaming is another way to get your message to the masses. Sure, your brand might have a website or a robust online store; or even a popular brick-and-mortar shop and a strong marketing team.

But to fully maximize your brand's reach, you need to optimize your brand's exposure. Livestreams offer a non-traditional exchange of information and help you pitch your brand in new and innovative ways. This carries massive appeal for those would-be customers who've yet to venture into your brand's more established spaces.

Grow Your Audience

The most immediate result of expanding your reach is the opportunity to access a broader audience. For every customer you reach, there's an even larger group of consumers you've yet to make your pitch to.

One of the great attributes of a livestream is it's quick, easy, and relatively cheap to produce. You can create big, glossy affairs that reach a large audience. Or you can craft smaller, more intimate presentations that target niche segments - those consumers your brand or product line might appeal to but who require more direct TLC.

Livestreaming offers a bigger bang for your buck in growing your audience both in time (versus creating a blog post) and money (versus building an all-encompassing marketing campaign).

Enhance Your Engagement

Informative blog posts, engaging marketing or email campaigns, and dynamic websites or landing pages are highly effective methods for promoting your brand. Done well, a bulk of your client roster will no doubt come from such efforts. Each one, however, offers a passive approach to customer engagement.

If you want to expand your marketing efforts into a more powerful medium, nothing says "right here and now" quite like a livestream. Livestreaming provides a sense of immediacy to your marketing efforts. Your calls to action are more direct, and time-sensitive promotions possess more urgency.

Livestreams are ideal for real-time feedback sessions. Transition your product demo stream into a product Q&A. Conduct property or production tours, introduce new team members or brand expansion. Or, as became increasingly common over the past year, socialize with team members or your most valued clients.

Free options

As you might expect, given the growing popularity of livestreaming, several free options cover the most straightforward live streaming video recording needs. These include:

Facebook: If you aim to reach as wide of an audience as possible, Facebook Live, the platform's live-streaming tool, is ideal. Not as feature-rich as other options, particularly YouTube Live, you can stream from your mobile device and save videos to your FB profile afterward.

Instagram: Arguably a more stripped-down service versus other free livestreamers, Instagram Live is ideal for spur-of-the-moment livestreams such as special access events or quick-hit info drops. Video streams are limited to an hour and will auto-delete one day after being posted to your stories.

Twitter: Like Instagram, Twitter's service is limited in scope but allows you livestream standalone audio sessions and will enable you to save your video streams to your mobile photo/video app. Twitter is a niche platform outside the U.S. (globally, it doesn't crack the top 15 social platforms), but savvy users can draw a captive livestream audience.

YouTube: The most popular video sharing site, and one of the most popular websites (and second most popular search engines), period, YouTube's free livestreaming service allows you to stream via webcam, internet browser, or your mobile device. Video quality includes Full HD, and you can repurpose your video later on.

Benefits of Free Options

The clear benefit of the free livestreaming options is that they are 100% free. Of course, you require an account for any of the above services, but those are also free of charge. Theoretically, you could be up and livestreaming in mere minutes if you so choose.

The other advantage of using a social media service is that they quickly achieve the trifecta of brand exposure - expand your reach, grow your audience, and enhance your engagement. As the platforms themselves are designed to be easy to use, you'll efficiently and cost-effectively connect with your audience.

Also, you're further taking advantage of each platform's popularity. Whatever network you use to livestream, there's an excellent chance that whatever audience you're attempting to reach is already there.

Video Communication Software

If you want to take your livestream efforts next level, it's worth considering full-service video communication software. Tools such as Livestorm provide a comprehensive livestream solution versus more scaled-back social media counterparts.

Essentially a single-stop platform for livestream or webinar-related needs, video communication offers unmatched flexibility for small startups, mid-range businesses, or large enterprise brands.

Benefits of Video Communication Software

When you employ dedicated livestreaming, you're utilizing the best streaming, presentation, and recording capabilities. In other words, there's no need to comprise which aspects of your live (or pre-recorded) videos are most critical to your success.

For starters, the overall user experience is more in tune with your brand's specific requirements, including actually branding your events, webinars, landing or registration pages. Video communication software is also a breeze for both audience members and you, the streaming host.

Most vital to your audience, there's the guarantee of unmatched video quality in your streams. You possess the ability to handle sizeable live attendee events or smaller, private meetings without sacrificing quality. That includes mobile streaming as well.

Standalone software offers fewer distractions than platforms based on social media. Even while conducting a meeting in-browser, you and your audience are free from the busy and crowded screens of YouTube or Facebook.

Additionally, you can engage your audience with polls, chats, and quizzes throughout your livestream. This helps them pay attention and reduces the temptation to scroll on their phone.

You also have access to detailed reports and analytics, which give you insight into how your audience behaved throughout the livestream.

And perhaps more than anything else, you gain livestream and event flexibility. Rather than being dependent on YouTube or Facebook, which have significant limitations, you’re free to do things your way.

Video Communication Software Features

Using Livestorm's core feature set as an example, video communication software includes, but is not limited to the following:

• Custom branding, including embedded forms and custom registration
• Hosting capabilities for webinars, live, pre-recorded, and on-demand
• Unlimited HD webinars, browser-based, and screen sharing
• In-webinar chat, Q&A, polls, and guest presenters
• Analytics and reporting, including source tracking, registrant profiles, and participation
• Automatic recording, unlimited replay storage, and reply analytics
• Email logistics that feature invitations, reminder, statuses, and customization
• Integrations with Zapier, CRMs, Slack, export capabilities to YouTube Live and Facebook Live or another live video stream

Final Thoughts

As much time and effort go into your livestreaming, don't dismiss them as a one-and-done proposition. Not everyone in your target audience has the time or is in a place to attend your livestream as it happens.

It's important to recognize that this is not an opportunity lost, but instead an opportunity gained. Ultimately, your livestream is another piece of content produced by you to grow your brand. You can capture your streaming videos - from product demos or training sessions to video conferences to webinars or webcasts - and easily repackage them as on-demand content.

Post your best prior streams to your website or online knowledge center, build a blog post around favorite events (or flip the transcript into its own post), or promote future streams by sending your marketing list snippets of past live events. One of the most popular after stream uses is adding additional production value and turning your livestream into a YouTube video.

Most importantly, choose the right livestream tool to ensure you get the most out of your livestreams - when they're live, when you record them, and beyond.