Live streams are more engaging than most news broadcasts on TV — your audience can interact with your reporter, ask questions, and be involved in how the story is reported. Getting your viewers to interact with your streams will help you create a community of followers who keep coming back to watch more. Here’s what to do to engage viewers once you’re actually live:
1. Have an extra person monitor and respond to comments.
While the journalist in the field is live streaming, they might miss questions and comments from the audience. Most live streaming platforms will let you have multiple people logged in to your profile, page, or channel at the same time. So if you have a producer logged in and monitoring the comments, they can help be sending written replies. When a media company live streams and responds to their viewers, their audience feels more valued and will be more interested in returning to future streams as well as staying on to watch the stream.
2. Discipline or ignore trolls, depending on what works for your streams.
Different media companies have different ways of handling troll comments depending on how bad they get. By prioritizing fruitful comments over ignorant or irrelevant comments, you will be engaging the audience that you want — the audience that cares about the subject.
Evan Hansen also suggests live streamers shouldn’t ignore the trolls completely, but should exert and maintain control of the comments when necessary.
4. Consider upgrading from a smartphone.
If your newsroom really wants to invest in quality live streaming, you should look at setting up a system where you have more control over the stream. Geoff Dietrich, the Executive Producer for Newsgathering at AJ+, says that the digital media company wants to use be able to transmit from a control room and add graphics onto live streams to keep audiences engaged.
“We’re looking at using a third party app to transmit the video back to us. We will have it go to a control room where we will be in total control. Different apps facilitate live streaming. It basically sends it to the control room where we can add graphics to it…We have more tools to keep the audience engaged. You can put text on screen, and if you’re not going to have a presenter, we want to find ways to add things to the feed and do it with our live team.” — Geoffrey Dietrich
Correction: This article has been altered to correct and attribute Fusion quotes to Katrine Dermody, Director of Social Media at Fusion Media
Simone Kovacs covers media innovation and video production for The Video Strategist and In the Field as a writer for Storyhunter, the world’s largest network of professional journalists and filmmakers. A Magna Cum Laude in English from Harvard and a poetry student at New York University, Simone was a staff writer for The Crimson and an editor a Tuesday Magazine, a literary publication. She also runs Storyhunter’s social media. Twitter: @storyhunter Facebook: @storyhunterTV. Storyhunter, founded in May 2012 by a group of journalists, filmmakers and web developers, is a talent marketplace and network for video professionals worldwide.