What You Need to Know About Live Streaming
If you’ve been on social media lately, you’ve seen the surge of live video. Virtually every social media platform has integrated live stream capabilities, and businesses increasingly taking advantage of the ability to reach their audience in a new and interactive way. In fact, Proxibid streams from Facebook and YouTube often to broadcast auctions and provide brand content to our users.
Why should you be using live video for your business?
Facebook reports that users spend 3X more time watching live videos than traditional videos (Source). Several studies report that live video is the highest performing content on average of all social media posts.
This new video form isn’t going away. In fact, 50% of marketers included live video creation into their plans for 2016 (Source).
There’s a huge opportunity for brands and businesses to capture the attention of new and returning users.
How can your business use live streaming?
Build Your Brand: Help your buyers put a name to the face. Let your audience see the people and processes behind the auction. This can be especially helpful for potential buyers who have not yet made a purchase with your business. Seeing the auctioneer or company representatives in action can help build trust between buyer and seller.
Preview Your Auction: Especially if your auction will be online only, you can preview auction items via live video on social media. Walk around the auction yard, show your audience multiple views of interesting items. Talk about the provenance of important items, or highlight information provided by the consignor.
Simulcast your Auction: There’s no denying the excitement of a live auction, and many people are interested in simply seeing auction content. During a live auction, stream part or the entirety of the auction. Perhaps a buyer forgot your auction was today, and the video is a reminder. Maybe a user shares the video with their audience, giving your event more exposure. Whatever the outcome, broadcasting your auctions has great results for brand equity and transparency.
Want to get started using live streaming? Here’s a few things to consider:
Equipment: All you need is a connected device, like a smartphone or tablet to start streaming. If you are live streaming to a business page, you may want to consider the Facebook Page Managers app, or similar, for other social networks. While more sophisticated technology exists for professional broadcasters, your mobile device is more than sufficient to get started.
Test, test, and test again: Before you go live, test your connection and device. Be sure to practice, and you can even tape one of your practice runs, in case the live video doesn’t work, and post it as a traditional video.
Latency: If you’re live streaming your auctions on social media, the stream will be delayed 30 seconds or more. We’ve found the most effective way to tackle this issue is to put a disclaimer in the video’s post. For example, “this video may be delayed, and is not intended for live bidding.” In addition, direct your users to your auction on Proxibid, where the live application has very little latency to ensure bids are received quickly in real-live time.
Proxibid offers live video and audio on Proxibid.com during your auctions. Inside the live bidding app, users can see and hear the auctioneer in real time with a simple camera and microphone setup. We’ve found buyers love the live video features when they can’t attend the auction in person.
For auctions with a Proxibid logistics agent on site, our team will take care of the details in getting video and audio on Proxibid.com. If a member of your team will be running the Proxibid live bidding application during your auction, contact your account manager for more information about enabling live video.