Meet your audience where they are

- Okay, you're ready to go live. Let's plan it out. First, though, I'd like to address a common question about the importance of planning. We've mentioned that a major benefit of live video is its fresh, spontaneous, personal approach. But that authenticity shouldn't come at the cost of low prep. Sloppy or unplanned videos can be detrimental to you and your brand. Research shows that more than 60% of viewers are more likely to have a negative perception of a brand that creates low quality videos. So strike the right balance between structure and informality. But in this course, I'm going to emphasize organization. And the first step of this is what I like to call meeting your audience where they are. That is do your homework to hone in on the background and habits of your target audience. What social media platform do they use the most? And getting a bit deeper on this point, what social media platform do they most engage with on live video? What are those engagement statistics? What day and time does your target audience have the highest engagement? What time zones do most of your target audience live in? What style and content does your audience most enjoy? Now, if you've already got a robust social media presence, you'll likely already know the answers to many of these questions. But if you're new to the space, you'll need to perform additional research to understand how your target audience engages with live video on each platform. Now, you can do this on both a macro and a micro level. High level, you can look at general engagement numbers for different platforms, many published recommendations for the best days and times to go live as well as general demographic information. Is your target demographic mostly in the 30 to 50 age range? Facebook Live might be your best bet. 18 to 30? Might want to go with Instagram live. Gen Z? Probably TikTok. Primarily professionals? LinkedIn Live could be a great option. On a micro level, you can peruse the live video activity and audience engagement of your brand and other brands in your space to get answers to some of these questions. This might mean attending other creators livecasts, immersing yourself as an audience member. A lot of people ask, "should I go live on one platform or multiple?" Choosing one can be a good strategy to focus your message and more directly connect to your primary target audience. But if you've identified that your target audience is quite active in multiple spaces, you may want to simulcast, using third party live casting software to go live on multiple platforms at once. If you're not sure which way to go, I recommend starting with one social media platform as you develop your live video presence and then you can transition to simulcasting. I'll just go through a brief rundown of these considerations for my own live cast. So you can get a sense of how I think about this. I'm going to be going live on LinkedIn. It may not be surprising that that's where my audience is. I manage a team of LinkedIn learning staff instructors and in addition to creating courses, each month we create social content around a different theme related to online teaching and learning. And this month's theme is going live. Very Meta, I know. So I'll be targeting people who are interested in not only online learning, but also live video. Now, I've studied the LinkedIn live analytics both on LinkedIn at large and in my own personal statistics. And I've deduced that the best days to go live are Tuesday through Thursday. And the best time to go live is anywhere between 10:00 AM and 1:00 PM Pacific or 1:00 PM and 4:00 PM Eastern. That means it's in the evening in Europe and Africa and in the middle of the night in many parts of Asia and Australia. But because my real time audience is mostly from the US and Europe, I'll cater to these time zones, but of course the replay will be available to everyone. All right, so that's our very high level plan for where and when the live will be. Let's continue planning!