How do you livestream if no one is watching? Why even bother? In this video I cover tips to help you livestream better and get more out of your live streams…especially if you’re just getting started and don’t have any (or many) viewers on your livestream.
🔴Get your free Facebook Live Cheat Sheets🔴: https://saranguyenonline.com/special/facebook-live-cheat_sheets/
🕒Timestamps🕒
00:00 Start
1:11 Biggest mistake new live streamers make
2:24 Replay love
4:39 Multistreaming
6:21 Create events
7:42 Promotion
8:39 Strategic content
10:24 Paid strategy
🎬Related videos🎬
How to use your iPhone as a webcam: https://youtu.be/8NyyphJgkzA
How to multistream: https://youtu.be/TQKHr9CXTzY
Top livestreaming platforms: https://youtu.be/_jg2KyJpatY
How to use Restream tutorial: https://youtu.be/BC1TmjmyKJI
How to livestream with no viewers – Video Transcript
If you’re new here, say hello in the comments or chat so that I can welcome you, excited to be here. And we have the all-clear. Hello, and welcome to the live stream. Whether you are joining live with me now, or if you’re catching us on the replay.
The topic of today’s live stream is how do you live stream when you have no viewers? If you’re just getting started with live streaming, if you’re just getting started with growing your business and growing your platforms on social media, you may not have many, or you may not have any viewers on your live stream.
And I get it, it can be incredibly discouraging and upsetting. And I’m going to talk a bit about this and also strategies to help you work through this. And so let’s get started.
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help coaches, consultants and creative pros build their business using video with ease. And I live stream a lot about live streaming.
Make sure that you check out the links in the description because I’ll go back and put all of the timestamps as well as any resources that I mentioned in this video. Let’s get right into it. When it comes to live streaming, this is the biggest mistake that I see lots of people who are new to live streaming make.
What happens is they go through this vicious circle and they get really excited about live streaming because they’ve heard about it and they want to try it out. And they hear people like me talk about how great it is in terms of building connection, and in terms of getting your content out there.
And they go, yeah, let’s live stream. And then they live stream, you know, they hit, they hit that go live button, whether it’s on Facebook, live, Instagram live or YouTube live, and then no one shows up, right?
And then they, and then you or they, you now think you’re a loser ’cause no one showed up and you put all this work into the live stream and you think you’re not good enough. Right? And therefore, you give up on live streaming or you don’t live stream consistently at all and your results suck.
And then you go into this vicious circle over and over again. And then it’s just, it’s really disheartening. I just want to talk a bit about this. I think the reality is that when you just get started with live streaming, there’s not going to be a lot of people.
And that’s just part of the game, and live streaming is a journey. But let’s talk about how we can work through this and you know, some things that we can do. The first thing I want to talk about is when it comes to live streaming, you shouldn’t feel so disheartened when there’s no one on the live stream, because there is so much value in the replay.
You need to consider all the replay love. Now, particularly on YouTube, after you live stream, your video then sits on YouTube, which is a massive search engine. If you optimise a video, you can get views after the replay, right?
Not having any viewers on the actual live stream, doesn’t actually matter. And to be honest, sometimes I prefer that because I find viewers distracting. I love you guys. Don’t get me wrong. I find viewers great.
And you know, they ask questions and they interact. But sometimes it’s really distracting because at the heart of it, you’re trying to deliver content. I really feel that you know, consider the replay love on YouTube. You’ll get the organic search through YouTube search afterwards so optimise it.
And on Facebook, I know people have feelings, some people are like, I hate Facebook. But Facebook live is amazing because you can then run that video as an ad and get views cheaply.
And you may be thinking, why would I even do that? And we’ll talk a little bit more about it later in the video, but strategically using your Facebook lives as ads to get more views and build your audience is an incredibly cost-efficient way of building your audience, driving traffic to your products and services and making money for your business.
Consider that if there’s no one on the live stream, that’s okay. Think of it as a way to deliver your content regardless if anyone is there. For an introvert like me, sometimes I’m like, woo-hoo, there’s not many people.
Woo-hoo there’s no one here, today I can just deliver. But, you know, it’s all about delivering the content and less so much about how many viewers are actually live on the replay. Now, if you structure your live stream to be, hey, ask me anything, and there’s no one there, I get it, it’s a little bit sad, but you know, it just makes you be a little bit more strategic about what you live stream about and the structure of your live stream.
Consider that there’s so much value in the replay and that, you know, the fact is people may not be able to meet you at this exact moment in time to watch it live, but they can watch the replay. Lots of replay love.
Now, the other thing that I want to talk about is multi-streaming. If you haven’t got a lot of viewers on Facebook or you haven’t got a lot of viewers coming in from YouTube, a strategy I want you to consider deploying is multi-streaming.
Now you may be saying, Sara, you’re drunk. It’s 8:00 AM in Sydney and you’re already drinking. And I’m like, no, I’m not. Think about it this way. Let’s say you have, you’re just getting started with live streaming or you have the small audience because you’re just building your business and you’re just getting out there.
If you let’s say live stream and you use a tool, you use tools such as Restream, or you use tools such as StreamYard, therefore, you can push out the same live stream to Twitter, to Facebook, to YouTube at the same time.
And maybe you might have one person on Facebook, you might have one person on Twitter and maybe one person on YouTube and all together, you get three people, right? Consider multi-streaming because it’s a way of bringing all of your audiences together.
And that way, you know, although they’re not interacting with each other, they can’t interact with you and you know, tools like StreamYard, and Restream make it easy so that you can have the chat all in one place. Consider multi-streaming if you’re not getting any or many people on the live stream and you want more engagement.
And it’s not hard to do, it’s literally switching another button in the system. You don’t actually have to do anything. You’re delivering the content anyway so you may as well press another button so that it can go live to another platform.
Multi-streaming, if you’re not getting any viewers consider multi-streaming so that you can push it out to more platforms as appropriate, of course. Now the other thing is I had, I was talking to someone and she was really disheartened because she went live and she did a lot of preparation and it was a fantastic live stream and no one showed up, right.
She was like, hey, let me know if you can hear me. And then there was no one there. And she was really upset. And then I said to her, did you create an event for it? Did you let people know that you were going to go live or did you just press go live and then, you know, hope for the best?
And she was like, well, I kind of was a bit afraid so I just hit go live. And I didn’t tell anyone. I’m like, well, that’s why they didn’t know. That’s why there was no one there.
You have an audience why didn’t you create an event on your Facebook page? Why didn’t you create a promotion for it so that people would know in advance that you are live streaming? That will give them a little bit of time if they want to make it, if they’re interested in joining you to actually be there.
Create events, whether that is actually creating a Facebook event, and then you can paste the link to the live stream, or you can, you know, simply create promotional graphics, such as, you know, social media posts to say, Hey, I’m going live next week.
Here’s what we’re talking about. Creating events so that people know advance that your live stream is coming up is a way to get more people onto the live stream. And it’s a really easy thing to do.
If you haven’t got any viewers, consider letting people know that you are going to live stream so that they can actually join you. Now touch base a little bit on it, but promoting your actual live streams.
As I said, although Facebook and YouTube push out notifications of when you’re going live, promoting your live stream is a great way of getting more people on it because they know that it’s, that you will be live and they know what the topic will be about.
I am a little bit bad at these because I’m just a bit disorganised in general, but promoting it, whether it’s, as I said, social media graphics, putting it on Facebook, putting it on your Instagram stories your Facebook stories is a great way of just letting people know so that they can see, Hey, this is coming up.
I may or may not be interested, I’ll join if I’m available. Promoting the actual live stream, whether it’s on Facebook or YouTube, wherever it is, is quite important. If you haven’t gotten any viewers consider promoting it.
These little micro things add up so that you can have more viewers on your actual live stream. Now, the second last one that I want to talk about is being strategic with your content.
I think there’s this misconception with live streams, because it is live and people really haven’t quite– a lot, not everyone, but people really haven’t quite understood that you can use your live stream content really strategically, particularly if you’re on Facebook live, right?
You can use those live streams to build your audiences, run ads, and then convert them, you know, from cold to warm audiences and start selling to your warm audiences, which convert cheap, a lot more cost-effectively.
They’re cheaper than selling directly to cold audiences. And live stream video, live stream content is the cheapest of all of the Facebook ad offerings at the moment and will be probably for a little while.
If you’re strategic with your live stream content, not having anyone actually on the live stream, it doesn’t actually matter. What’s more important is that you deliver your content so that you have these piece of video, this video that you can then use for Facebook ads, building audiences, retargeting, and growing your business.
It’s really important that you think of live streams more strategically and not just this throw away thing like most people do where it’s like, Oh, everyone’s doing it so I’ll just go live and, you know, we’ll see who shows up and I’ll answer whatever question I wanna answer.
No, it’s about finding content that people want to know the answers to. It’s about content that builds demand and desire for your actual products and services. It really is a play to help grow your business.
Think of live streams more strategically, and that will help you feel a little bit better when there’s no one actually on the actual live stream. Now I touched on it, but consider a paid strategy.
And people go, I don’t want to pay for Facebook ads, but I absolutely love organic traffic. I love the traffic that I get from Google for free, “for free”. I love the traffic that I get from YouTube, but it’s also a slow burn, right?
And that’s just the fact of the matter. That’s just how organic traffic works. It’s great. Once you get it going, it takes a while, but it’s also slow. If you want to really grow your business quickly, ads is the way to go. And if you’re using live streams as your, as a way of creating content, it’s a really cost-effective way.
I absolutely love, I’ve started testing it out and I’m literally blown away. You can get views for like cents per view and the conversion on that blowing my actual mind. Consider that if you’re live streaming and your business, if you have products and services to sell, that on the back end of that is your products and services.
Having people on the actual live stream, having people watch it is a nice to have, but it’s actually not necessary at all. Hopefully that will make you feel a little bit better about it all. Those are my strategies for what to do when you’ve got no viewers on your live stream.
In summary, it doesn’t really matter because if you’re using live streaming strategically to grow your business, you’ll see that it’s a way of creating content. And you will see that it’s a way that you can get your message out there so that you can leverage the post-activity, whether that is, you know, optimising it for search or pushing some ads to it so that you can actually build audiences and convert those audiences.
That basically is my little tips on what to do when you’ve got no viewers on your live stream. Oh, Hey Pete, John’s! Good to see you there. He says, “Great topic. Personally, I like talking to myself, less arguments”, Pete, I like I’m talking to myself as well.
I gave myself the best advice. And Pete also has says, “love it, Sara, having a plan is super important, nothing worse than the awkward dead air”.
And I’m all for live streams being in the moment and people, you know, showing personality and this, you know, I think that I have awkward moments all the time because I’m just an awkward person, but I think that comes back to being strategic with your livestreams is incredibly important.
Definitely love that. And, HausaFilms, am I using the iPhone as a webcam? This one no, because I need my iPhone to communicate with my producer during the live stream.
I am currently using the Canon 90d, but I do use it. It’s a great little, you know, video. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, I recently released a video on how to use your iPhone as a webcam using FilMic Pro.
I’ll put the link in the description somewhere, but that was a great little video. That essentially wraps us up. Thanks, everyone for joining me. And if you found this, I keep doing this.
If you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel where I do lots of social media tutorials, live streaming tutorials, and I help you grow your business using video. If you are getting into the live stream game, make sure you check out my Facebook Live Cheat Sheets.
It’s a super simple way to get up and streaming on Facebook live, even if you’ve never hit record before. I’ll put the link to that in the description as well as on the screen somewhere. Thanks for joining me. I will see you on the next video and bye for now.
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