Live Streaming During the Pandemic

Just like the rest of the world, when the pandemic hit, we had to work from home and adjust to this new normal. But it did not stop us from our weekly live webinars. Every Tuesday at 3pm ET we go live on Facebook and YouTube to discuss anything and everything in the industry. When the team had to work from home, we were positive that with the tools we had, our remote shows would be successful. We used Wirecast Gear, Skype, NDI, Zoom, and Rendezvous. Even though we are back in the studio producing our shows, we know if we ever must work remote again, we will be more than prepared to have the show go on.  

President, Gary Bettan often emphasizes that social distancing requires live streaming, and that streaming will be here to stay long after pandemic. When hosting our webinars, he gives tips and tricks to our audience to improve their own productions. The advice he gives, we use daily in our own studio, and our YouTube analytics prove that we have live streaming figured out. During the month of September, we did a whole back to school special which got some of our highest views. Gary gave tips tricks, and workflows to the education audience for the transition to remote learning and how teachers can make the most out of remote learning with live streaming. These 4 webinars got a combined total of 25.9K views.

Gary says, your fourth show will always be better than your first. Our first remote show in March 2020 had about 5K views. After getting used to the remote setup our views went up by over 2K views by the fourth remote show. As we started doing more remote streaming and getting in the swing of everything, we were able to have a steady increase in our views and even reached over 30K views for one of our webinars streamed in July 2020. We also started bringing in remote guests that gave our viewers a new experience. With the right tools and practice we can bring in multiple guests at once and stream a successful show. 

We gained a loyal audience by continuing to connect with our viewers during the pandemic. We hosted shows right when lockdown started on topics, we knew our audience needed and wanted to hear. Our first few remote shows were “Videoguys Tips for Live Streaming,” “Videoguys Guide to Web Streaming with Remote Guests,” and “Videoguys Guide to Streaming with Zoom.” We knew this is what we needed to provide our viewers with to help them in the world of live streaming, that many of our viewers were new to. With our consistent weekly webinars, we saw a huge increase in our views from the previous year. Over the past 12 months our views have increased by over 200K and our impressions increased by 2.4 million. Our monthly views range from 39,100-54,300.   

We promote our videos on our Facebook page and Instagram account to gain organic views.  After a couple days we do put money behind our videos with YouTube Advertising which help us get to the higher numbers. These bring it more than just views, we gain new subscribers to our YouTube channel and we see the percentage of returning viewers go up. We get tons of calls from customers saying they saw our video on YouTube and how helpful they have been, we also get a good number of comments from our viewers on our videos that open banter between us and our customers. 

Live streaming is here to stay. Even with things slowly transitioning back, live streaming brings in a bigger audience than ever before and we believe that schools, houses of worship, government agencies, and businesses will be using live streaming in the future. This past year has shown that even with the difficulties thrown our way we are able to keep live streaming our webinars and stay connected to our audience. And we believe you can too with the right tools. Give us a call at 800-323-2325 or visit Videoguys.com to get started live streaming today.