How to increase audience engagement on live video

Increasing Audience Engagement with Live Video

Let’s say you organized a live event and you managed to get some sponsors and you invited a panel of speakers plus a guest host and then the day of the event turned out to have a torrential rain storm and only 12 people showed up?

Not so great, right?

But what if you live streamed your event? – and encouraged audience engagement? Could you reach a much larger audience and turn your first-time turnout into a big success…?

Here’s an example of a first-time event that had an attendance of fewer than 20 people (including the presenters!) and yet managed to reach an online audience of hundreds viewers who watched the live stream. This case study shows how you can dramatically increase audience engagement.

Just this week, I was at an event that was the first time this event had ever happened. And it was in the morning. It started at 8:00AM and it was on a really rainy day.

You can imagine the turnout we had.

For this event the organizer had recruited three panelists and a host plus another guest speaker and two sponsors who also got up and spoke to the audience – a total of eight people including the organizer himself. The total number of people was less than twenty – so the audience size was pretty modest for this first-time event.

We could have all been quite disappointed at this turnout. However, I was there with my phone and I made the whole thing go live onto Facebook which gave us the chance to reach a much bigger group of people.

I’d like to share with you the results we got from this experiment. There were two things that worked really well for this kind of audience building.

The first thing that happened was that I got up in front of the group and I asked them to pull out their phone and to go to the Awesome Videomakers page on Facebook where they could see the live stream. I enrolled them in the vision of helping us grow the event simply by hitting the share button.

We got a total of 16 shares. Which means practically everyone there actually did what I asked them to. It’s an amazing response from the number of people who were there.

What did that do for us? The live stream had a total reach of over 3,000 people and over 800 views! From an audience of 20 to and audience of 800!

The second thing that we did that seemed to work well was that we asked people who were wathing the video to respond to us during the presentation.

In this case the event was all about leadership for millennials. The organizer of the event asked the audience, “Which generation are you? Are you a millennial? A baby boomer? Generation x? Or generation y? In the comments write in ‘millennial’ or write in ‘baby boomer.'”

And that was a very good prompt. And this is the kind of thing that you want to be doing in your events to get people to respond to you in the comments – even when they’re watching during the replay.

Don’t ask tough questions where they have to write long answers. Give them a multiple choice or give them the word to say to respond. And what that does for you is that it takes an anonymous group of viewers who will now identify themselves. They raise their hand and say, “Here’s my answer.” Facebook displays their name and profile picture so you can reply to them and start having a real conversation.

And then, of course, make sure you invite them to your next event.

Want to learn more about how to increase audience engagement and the nuances of audience building? Then join my FREE Videomaking Mastermind group on Facebook where there’s a daily discussion and lots of video examples being shared.