5 Ways To Get More Viewers For Your Live Broadcasts

This post talks about five steps you can take to reach more people with your live stream. It's part of our series on how to start live streaming.

For any organization looking to grow and expand its reach through live streaming, increasing viewership is paramount. Some people may expect viewers to flock to them just by streaming their content and walking away, but unfortunately there’s no overnight success to virality. You have to make people aware of your live streams, and you have to let them know where to access it.

In this blog post, I share five tips that can help you combat low viewership. Keep in mind that it's a process, and it does take some time to see results. However, I promise that if you put all five to use, you’ll see your numbers increase.  

1. Broadcast Everywhere You Can 

Simulcasting is a great way to make your stream easier to find. Simulcasting is simply means broadcasting to several channels at once, so that you can meet your audience where they are, and increase your viewership numbers altogether.

If you just stream to one platform, you may limit the number of people that you reach.

The BoxCast Platform makes it easy to reach your viewers wherever they are, whether it’s to your website, Facebook Live, YouTube Live, or TV Apps (AppleTV, Roku).Think of attracting viewers like catching fish, the wider you can cast your net the more viewers you’re going to get.

2. Produce with Consistency 

You know why people love football season? Its because they get to see their team play every week. That’s called cadence, and you need to create the same expectation with your viewers. Streaming on a consistent basis will help keep your streams top of mind, and remind your viewers to tune in regularly.

3. Promote Your Streams Ahead of Time

Sometimes in video production it’s easy to get so caught up in the quality of the broadcast, that you forget about the promotion and distribution of your streams.

Email blasts, social media marketing, and promoting on your website are the most effective ways we’ve seen this done, and they’re all free! And don’t be bashful, if you have room, just embed the live stream player on your homepage.

4. Clip Highlights during the event

If you see something awesome happen during the stream, don’t wait until later to promote it. Clip it, and share it right away on social media, it creates hype around your events and can help you get additional viewers during the stream.

BoxCast's Highlights tool is super easy to use, and you can download them after the stream to create a highlight reel for your future promotions. Similar to movie trailers, highlight reels are a great way for people to see a summary of your events in a short amount of time.

5. Focus on quality

Last but not least, make sure your streams look and sound great. I always ask myself before I produce something, is this something that I’d want to watch? Streaming compelling, high quality content is ultimately the best way to ensure that people will continue to watch.

Final Thoughts + Further Reading

The five tips above can be very helpful as you look to increase viewership for your live streams.

When it comes to promoting your live streams, the best tools available today are social media platforms. How to Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Organization provides tips on how to utilize social media to promote your upcoming live streams.