Live video with Periscope and Meerkat: real uses for brands

Live streaming is not new. Ustream and Livestream have been around for years, and YouTube has offered live events for some time. What changed this spring is friction. Meerkat and Periscope strip it down to one tap, broadcast from the phone in your hand, and tie the audience to Twitter so people arrive within seconds of you going live.

Meerkat launched February 27, took off at South by Southwest, and then had its access to Twitter's social graph cut off in mid-March once Twitter's own acquisition became public. It still posts to Twitter, but it no longer imports your followers automatically. Broadcasts are not saved by default.

Periscope launched March 26 on iOS and reached Android on May 26. It sends a tweet when you go live, viewers tap hearts and comment in real time, and the replay stays available for 24 hours before disappearing. It passed a million users in its first ten days and is where most of the brand activity has settled.

Both are vertical video, both are rough by design, and both reward the host more than the production.

The temptation is to broadcast because you can. Resist that. Live works when the fact that it is live adds something a recorded video would not.

Behind the scenes. A product being made, a kitchen before service, a photo shoot, a warehouse on launch day. The appeal is access, and access only means something if it is unpolished.

Live Q&A. A founder or expert takes questions from the comments for 20 minutes. This is the highest-value format for most businesses because the audience sets the agenda and you learn what they care about.

Product demos and launches. Show the thing working, let viewers ask to see specific features, and answer objections in the moment. Replays give you a day of extended reach.

Events. Conference talks, store openings, trade show floors. Give the people who could not be there a window in.

Customer service in public. A scheduled weekly session where someone from support walks through the most common questions. Humanizing, and it quietly reduces ticket volume.

What does not work: broadcasting a press release, reading a script to the camera, or streaming an empty room while waiting for something to start.

The businesses getting results are not doing it once. They have picked a slot and kept it. Here is a format that works.

1. Pick a host. One person, comfortable on camera, who knows the product. Not necessarily the most senior person. Consistency builds a following; rotating faces does not.
2. Fix a schedule. Same day, same time, weekly or every other week. Announce it on Twitter and in email the day before and an hour before.
3. Write a one-page run sheet. Opening line, three things to show or talk about, a call to action, a closing. Not a script. Enough that the host never wonders what comes next.
4. Prepare the frame. Check what is visible. Whiteboards, screens, customer names and anything else confidential come out of shot. Test the Wi-Fi or use cellular with a strong signal; buffering is the fastest way to lose viewers.
5. Assign a moderator. A second person on another phone watching comments, flagging good questions to the host and blocking abuse. Periscope lets you restrict comments to people you follow if a broadcast attracts trouble.
6. Open with context, repeatedly. Viewers arrive throughout. Every few minutes, restate who you are and what this is.
7. Give a reason to come back. A question for next week, a product arriving, a discount code read out loud.
8. Save it. Periscope can save the broadcast to your camera roll. Use that file afterwards.

A good first broadcast is 10 to 15 minutes. Twenty to thirty works once an audience shows up. Longer than that and the host is talking to the replay.

Twenty-four hours is not a content strategy. The live broadcast is the raw material.

• Clip the best 30 to 60 seconds and post it natively to Twitter and Facebook, where video gets priority in the feed this year.
• Turn a Q&A into a blog post or FAQ page. The questions came straight from customers, which makes it the easiest content you will write all month.
• Pull quotes and reactions from comments into email.
• Upload the full recording to YouTube if the quality holds up, with a proper title and description, so it keeps working in search.

Measured this way, a broadcast that drew 80 live viewers can reach several thousand people over the following week.

Live video carries risk because there is no edit. Brands have already had broadcasts hijacked by abusive comments, and at least one major sporting event this spring saw its broadcaster complain publicly about people streaming it from their seats. Manage the obvious risks and the rest is tolerable.

• Comments. A moderator and the follower-only comment setting when needed.
• Rights. Do not stream content you do not own, including music playing in the background, televised events or other people's presentations without permission.
• Privacy. Get consent from anyone who will appear, especially staff and customers. Keep minors out of frame entirely.
• Confidentiality. Clear the room of anything you would not put on a billboard.
• The host. If something goes wrong, acknowledge it and move on. Audiences forgive honesty on live video more readily than they forgive polish on recorded video.

Both apps give you live viewer counts, and Periscope shows replay views and hearts. Beyond that, track what you can: Twitter follower growth around broadcast times, replies and retweets on the announcement tweets, traffic to a page you mentioned, redemptions of a code you read out, and email signups on the day. Set a modest expectation up front, perhaps 50 live viewers and 300 replay views by the fourth broadcast, and judge the program on whether it is building rather than on any single stream.

We start with discovery: who in the business could host, what customers actually ask, and what already happens day to day that would be worth seeing. From that we plan a format and a schedule, with a run sheet template and clear rules on what stays out of frame. Build means getting the first few broadcasts out the door with support on the day, plus the system for clipping and republishing afterwards, so each stream feeds social, email and the website. Then we improve: reading what viewers asked, adjusting the format and connecting what we learn to the brand, content and growth work around it. Live video is cheap to produce, but it only pays off when it is part of a connected content program rather than an experiment someone ran once.

A representative engagement is the content program we built for a business whose founders had deep expertise and no habit of sharing it. We paired a weekly live Q&A with a repurposing routine that turned every session into short clips, an article and an email, so the live audience was small but the content output was constant. The founders became visibly more comfortable on camera within a month, the questions shaped the editorial calendar, and the archive of answered questions became one of the most visited sections of the site.