Since the launch of the Instagram story at the start of this week my team have fully thrown themselves into the world live streaming, not just on Instagram but on platforms like Periscope and SnapChat. We have been streaming for our brands and on our personal accounts to fully emerge ourselves in the consumer journey and to see what we can learn. It's good to know that everyone at Araminta Marketing is more than happy to jump in at the deep end! In our posting, watching, interacting, we have seen great effects on smaller and bigger brands alike..
Tone of Voice:
Live streaming puts you on the spot and, after the initial awkward posts, forces certain aspects of your personality to come out. In the case of a lot of the brands we work with, the tone of voice is set by the founder(s). Often the brand owner is the target audience. When this is the case we spend time noting how our clients speak, write, whatsapp etc to try and carry certain intentions on to their social media to make their brand unique, identifiable and exciting. So far I see live streaming as a fast track to identifying a tone of voice. There is not only an evolution of how people are speaking, but how they are writing the copy for their posts.
Directing Traffic:
It's a great way of informing people without being too pushy. Telling them instantly when you've uploaded a blog post or a YouTube video. It's not always what you say but how you say it. People can interpret writing in different ways but will get a much stronger sense that you're informing people, not necessarily selling to them all the time.
Analytics:
As I said in my previous post on how to battle your live streaming fear, you can see who is looking at your story on Instagram, when they stop watching, whether they check your story every day or see one post and never look again. You can click through to peoples profile and see exactly how your audience use Instagram, and tell how they live (or at least how they like to portray their lives). This means you can tailor content, not only to your audience as a whole, but to each individual. This is something we have doing a lot of recently with our clients through more subtle campaigns. Social media isn't just about what you are putting on your feed, it's about how you interact with your audience. If you're just posting and spend no time looking, you're missing gaping opportunities.
Interaction:
We have noticed that if people are watching you, they will interact as they go along. On Instagram stories, for example, comments go directly to your Instagram inbox. This takes away some of the stigma around how people are presenting themselves online and allows people to be more open, honest, direct, natural and actually in the moment, rather than appearing as though they are posting in the moment. With Periscope, people are commenting as you are live streaming so they are joining in your conversation. You can then react to their conversation live- how great it that?!