Top live streaming platforms to use in 2020

What are the best live streaming platforms and which one should you choose as a business? I talk about the top livestreaming platforms of 2020 and what to consider when streaming to each site.

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🕒 Timestamps:🕒
00:00 Start
1:25 YouTube Live
5:08 Facebook Live
7:30 LinkedIn Live
9:15 Periscope
10:24 IG Live
12:56 Twitch
14:17 Multistreaming
14:47 Pros and cons of multistreaming
15:30 Which livestream site should you use?

Related videos
How to multistream: https://youtu.be/TQKHr9CXTzY
Best live streaming software and apps (Which livestream software to pick): https://youtu.be/GWU2k_aOp6c

Top live streaming platforms to use in 2020 – Video Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the live stream, whether you are joining live with me now, or if you’re catching us on the replay. What are some of the best live streaming platforms that you can use right now?

Whether you are interested in streaming just to one platform or multi-streaming, I’m going to go through the top live streaming platforms. And we’re going to talk about the pros and cons of them and just in general, what you would actually use them for.

And if they’re actually a fit for you and your business. 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. Now 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 links to any resources that I mentioned this video.

Live streaming platforms. What are they? There are lots of live streaming platforms, but we are going to go through some of the top ones for business, right? This is specifically for business.

If you’re a gamer, that’s not my jam. I’m not quite the right person to be talking about gaming because I don’t game myself and I don’t live stream gaming. But if you’re a business thinking about, okay, I want to live stream.

I want to get my message out there. I want to create more content so I can get more visibility. You’re in the right place. Now let’s start with the big obvious one. Right now I am streaming via YouTube live as well as Facebook live.

But let’s talk a little bit about YouTube live. With YouTube live, you can access YouTube live and live stream via YouTube, via desktop and mobile if you have more than a thousand subscribers for mobile.

You can access it from desktop, regardless of how many subscribers you have. But if you want to live stream from your mobile via YouTube live, you need to have at least a thousand subscribers. Now there are lots of benefits to live streaming on YouTube.

And the biggest obvious one is that if you create live streams or if you live stream to YouTube, you get the benefit of your video indexing and search afterwards. That’s a massive benefit to as an incentive to live stream because it enables your video to get found after you’ve actually livestream.

There’s a big misconception that when it comes to YouTube videos that live streams are not as valued as uploaded videos. And for this last year, I predominantly been live streaming only as opposed to uploading videos as a result of all of the craziness that’s happened.

This is how I’m choosing to cope with it. And this is how I’m choosing to create content. Now, I have found personally that my live stream videos get as much reach and as much engagement as my uploaded video.

I really believe that the misconception that people don’t value live video as much as an uploaded video is not true. And what it really comes down to is how you deliver your content, right? People think of live streaming as this throwaway because you go live and then, you know, if it doesn’t work out, you can delete it, but that’s not true.

If you start to treat your live streams like a serious tool for creating content, you’ll start to see lots of results for it. Anyway, so with live streaming, I also find– well live streaming on YouTube I also find that it’s a great way of getting watch time, right?

Even if you’re a small creator to start, even if you don’t have lots of subscribers, if you only get a few live viewers who watched the entire live stream or a large portion of the live stream, which most people do, you’ll find that that will count towards your watch time and help build your watch time faster, particularly if you’re still trying to get monetised.

That’s a little hack for you there. And I really feel that when it comes to YouTube live, people also think that why would I live stream on YouTube? Is my audience there?

And from my experience, I think that the audience on YouTube is so vast and so broad. And like there really is a category for everyone. And if you are a business, I would be really surprised if in one form or another, your audience isn’t on YouTube.

It’s one, you know, one of the biggest search engines, therefore I find YouTube live probably one major platform that you should consider if you are a business, if you want to start live streaming to get more reach, to generate more content and to help start converting people into your products and services.

YouTube live, absolutely love it. But just remember that, you know, you have to do the other things to make your video successful. You need to optimise it. You need to, you know, do your keyword research.

You need to make sure that you have titles and tags and thumbnail. You still need to play that game when it comes to YouTube live. But that doesn’t mean it’s not doable. And that doesn’t mean that there’s no value.

Absolutely love YouTube live as an option for a live streaming platform. Now, the next one is one of my favourite babies. With Facebook live, you once again, can access Facebook live via your desktop or via your mobile device.

And it’s also available on your business pages as well as your personal profile. But the benefit of live streaming from your business page is that you get access to analytics. You get to see the data and the insights behind how your live stream performed.

But the main secret sauce behind Facebook live is that you’re able to then use your live videos and run them as ads to get more views. And you may be thinking, why would I even bother to do that?

And once again, I really think this is really misunderstood when it comes to Facebook because generating views on your Facebook live streams using ads, isn’t, isn’t, that’s not the only step. The beauty of Facebook is with the audiences that you can build.

You can start advertising to cold audiences. And then once you have this group of cold audiences who interacted with your Facebook live stream, you can then turn around and start marketing to that audience. And as that audience grows larger, you have a larger pool of people to sell to, right? Pardon me?

And that’s the beauty of Facebook live. You get to really easily generate video view, video view ads, which are also really cheap to build your audience, which also makes it cheaper to run ads to as opposed to trying to run ads to a cold audience.

Facebook live really, I think the big play behind Facebook live is in the longer strategic term that you use your Facebook live streams as audience building ads, as well as, as ads to start converting your products.

But I love Facebook live. I think that people are a little bit afraid of Facebook ads because it’s so not intuitive. And it’s so, it feels really scary because you’re throwing money at it.

But if you’re a business and if you’re serious about selling, if you’re serious about scaling your business, Facebook live and adding that combination with Facebook ads is a way of growing really quickly. And it’s a way of building your brand and it’s way of making money.

I absolutely love Facebook live and you know, I teach it and I have a course about it. Obviously I’m going to be a little bit biased and an advocate for the platform. Now let’s look at the next one, which is LinkedIn live.

When LinkedIn live came out, we all kind of looked at each other and we’re like, LinkedIn live? Like you’re drunk, go home. What are you guys doing? Why would you even have live streaming for a platform that is predominantly for business professionals and predominantly for people who are, you know, who are working?

Like they’re not, it’s not Facebook. They’re not there sitting, scrolling LinkedIn all day or are they? But it’s a platform that’s available. Now when it comes to LinkedIn live, you do still need to apply to access LinkedIn live.

If you go, if you want to use it, you need to obviously link, log into your LinkedIn account, but then you actually need to apply. And there’s a form that they have, which, you know, you can fill in and then you apply to get access to it.

Once you’ve got access to it, once they’ve approved it, then you’ll be able to live stream once again from your desktop and mobile. And I think LinkedIn live becomes really relevant to you as a live streaming platform if your business is predominantly a B2B place or business to business play, or if you’re targeting professionals, right.

That’s right in your sweet spot. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to testing, right? It really is about, you know, testing whether or not LinkedIn is right for you as a business. And with linkedIn live, although they’re still relatively new, you can still use third-party software such as Restream and StreamYard to live stream to LinkedIn.

LinkedIn live the odd one of the bunch, but it’s there and people are using it and testing it out. I’m interested to know if you’ve actually used LinkedIn live and gotten any results from it. Now, let’s talk about Periscope.

Periscope, after they came out, they were purchased by Twitter. Technically when you live stream, it goes to both Twitter and what is still Periscope, but it’s owned by Twitter at the moment and that they bought them out in 2015.

And I find Periscope and Twitter interesting. And I find it more useful that, you know, if you have a Twitter account, if you have a Twitter following, it’s another way of getting more reach.

If you’re going to live stream, and you want to multistream, you’ve got multiple social media accounts. You may as well switch on Twitter and get, you know, the viewers who are on that platform at that time.

It’s an interesting one. I’ve had mixed experiences with it. I’ve had, you know, the odd, random Twitter person who’s been following me and, or the odd person on Periscope who’s seen my live streams and then joined it.

But for the most part, I haven’t had massive reach from Periscope, but it’s still one there for you to test. Like your experience could definitely be different. Periscope, definitely an interesting one. Now let’s talk about the next one.

Nice little segue is Instagram live. With Periscope, Periscope is also available on desktop and predominantly yeah, I think I mostly access it via desktop. With Instagram live, it’s a mobile-only thing.

I know that people have found third-party apps, which allow them to hack the system and then live stream via desktop to Instagram live. But at the moment, that’s still against their terms of service.

If you want to live stream to Instagram live, you have to use a mobile device. You can’t use third-party apps at the moment. I really hope that they change that so that we can add another, you know, feed to the multistream. But at the moment it’s only via mobile.

If I wanted to technically multistream to all of my platforms and Instagram live, I’d have to like have my mobile up as well as my everything else. I couldn’t actually just do it via live stream software at the moment.

But Instagram live is a really intriguing one because once again, like Facebook live, you can then turn your Instagram lives into an ad and get more reach and target the right people and build audiences that way. And people may, I’ve seen a lot of anecdotal comments about how, Oh, you know, Instagram live is only for young people. Instagram live is only for this audience.

And I have seen the data suggest otherwise. In my experience, Instagram live or Instagram, in general, is really great for eCommerce businesses, services, coaches, products. I’ve purchased just over the weekends so much stuff just from scrolling the Instagram feed.

I’m really vulnerable. Please. Makeup companies, beauty companies, stop targeting me. Your ads are too good. I’m just spending all my money because of Instagram ads, but they’re effective, right?

They’ve got great targeting features because you get the same targeting, well, same ads platform as you do with Facebook live. Instagram live is an interesting one, and it’s a good one because you can also leverage ads as well.

And at the end of the day, it really is about once again, testing which platform works best for you and your business. But it’s another one to consider. And another one where people do engage with and people do, you know, find value with and it’s another way of building your brand and being visible if you only have a mobile device as well.

It’s a great platform to test out. Now, the last one that I’m going to talk about is Twitch. And you may be saying Sara, you’re drunk, go home.

And in my defence Twitch, yes, has been known as a gaming platform, but it’s starting to see traction now where people are using it and channels that are non predominantly gaming channels, such as art channels, such as design channels, such as, I’ve seen like some robotics and some science channels and some tech channels starts to really grow and start to build an audience on Twitch.

At the end of the day, all of these platforms come down to you testing and seeing if your content resonates with the audiences on these platforms, and you giving it a try in order to see if it works for you. But I’m starting to see people get some movement on Twitch.

I’m not on Twitch at the moment, but I’m considering it as another platform to test anyway, because, you know, I find that particularly if you’re multi-streaming, all it is in order to live stream to another platform is essentially switching another button in the system so that you live stream once and it goes to all of these platforms.

Twitch is another one, which is intriguing me. And I think it’s definitely one worth testing as well. I wanted to talk a little bit about multi-streaming a little bit more.

We have all of these platforms that I talked about, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Periscope, Twitch, with the exception of Instagram that you can’t actually connect to third-party apps to multistream to, the rest of them you can essentially live stream to.

And that’s a really efficient way of testing them all out in one go, because if you’re going to live stream to, you know, once you may as well live stream to all of them. The thing to be aware of with multi-streaming is that see, I feel that the content that you deliver, you just need to be careful that and mindful that it is going to be on all of these different platforms.

Content that may, structures that may work for Facebook may be different to structures that work for YouTube, right? And just to be aware that this is going to different platforms and to, you know, format how you deliver your content accordingly. Keep that in mind.

What else I was gonna talk about? That’s a big, that’s the thing to consider with multi-streaming. It’s a great way of testing all of these platforms, but just be aware that, you know, there are different, different things that come with these platforms.

If I had to summarise the ones that I, how it all comes together, I find that YouTube live is great because you get organic, organic traffic from your live stream after the live stream’s over, if you optimise it.

I find that Facebook live is fantastic because you can run those lives in Twitch. All worth testing. That essentially–
looks like my livestream has died on me.

Okay, we’re back. That was really weird. Okay. We had some weird thing there, but we’re going to keep going, ’cause we’re going to finish the live stream. That essentially wraps up today’s live stream.

And we only had one technical hiccup, but that’s okay. If you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up. And 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 build your business using video with ease.

Now, if you are interested in live streaming, make sure that you grab a copy of my Facebook Live Cheat Sheets. It’s a super simple guide to get you up and streaming with Facebook live, even if you’ve never hit record before.

I’m going to put it on the screen as well as in the link in the description. Thanks for joining me today. And I’ll see you on the next video. Bye for now.