Have you thought about having a live Q&A streamed on social media?

Hosting a live Q&A on social media is an excellent way to connect with your client base and attract new clients. But to make the most of it, there are a few important things to bear in mind.

Benefits of Live Q&As

Before getting into tips to run a live Q&A successfully on social media, it’s important to understand why they matter. A live Q&A can deliver the following benefits for your small business:

●      Boost engagement

●      Expand your reach

●      Improve your online presence

Choose the Platform Carefully

The first thing to do is decide what platform to host your live Q&A on. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch are all popular options, but they are far from the only choices. Remember to use a channel that will let your audience interact with you via chats.

The key to making the right decision is to choose the social media channel that your customers are on. If you want to maximize engagement during the Q&A, opt for the platform where you have the most followers and where your audience is most active. Still, you could also try using a Q&A livestream to grow your audience on a lesser-used channel. In that case, you will need to make sure to advertise heavily on the channels your audience spends more time on.

Hosting a live Q&A on social media is an excellent way to connect with your client base and attract new clients. But to make the most of it, there are a few important things to bear in mind.

Benefits of Live Q&As

Before getting into tips to run a live Q&A successfully on social media, it’s important to understand why they matter. A live Q&A can deliver the following benefits for your small business:

●      Boost engagement

●      Expand your reach

●      Improve your online presence

Choose the Platform Carefully

The first thing to do is decide what platform to host your live Q&A on. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch are all popular options, but they are far from the only choices. Remember to use a channel that will let your audience interact with you via chats.

The key to making the right decision is to choose the social media channel that your customers are on. If you want to maximize engagement during the Q&A, opt for the platform where you have the most followers and where your audience is most active. Still, you could also try using a Q&A livestream to grow your audience on a lesser-used channel. In that case, you will need to make sure to advertise heavily on the channels your audience spends more time on.

Ask for Questions and Prepare Answers

When advertising your upcoming Q&A, encourage people to submit questions to you. This saves you the stress of having to choose a question and answer it on the fly. It also lets you choose questions to answer based on your goals. Preselecting questions to answer will also help you address the most common queries of your customer base.

Once you have your list of questions, you can adequately prepare answers. It’s best to prepare your answers in bullet points and not sentences. Doing so will make your responses sound natural and not rehearsed, and you will ensure that all important points are covered since they are listed down.

Come Up with Additional Questions

If your audience doesn’t submit a substantial number of questions before the Q&A, come up with a few yourself. If you need inspiration, think about the most common questions thrown at your customer support team. Once you identify potential questions, you can prepare your responses in advance.

By preparing for this, you ensure that you have enough content to fill your planned livestream. With an adequate amount of questions and answers, you decrease the chances of lulls or dead air in your live online event.

Choose a Moderator

While you don’t need a moderator for a successful livestream, it can be incredibly helpful for a Q&A. This is especially important if you plan on answering questions that your audience submits during the livestream. In that case, the moderator will be responsible for deciding which questions get answered.

Even if you have your audience submit questions ahead of time, the moderator can help ensure that multiple people don’t start talking at once. Moderators help you run your event smoothly.

Interact With Your Audience

While you want to prepare some answers to questions before the Q&A session, you also want to give the audience opportunities to interact with you. Without the interaction, you might as well show a pre-recorded video instead of doing a livestream.

A good method to keep your audience engaged is to interact with users as they join. You can mention specific names as you welcome them. When you answer questions asked by users, make your responses personalized and sincere.

Do a Tech Run

One of the worst things that can happen is for you to experience technical difficulties while you are live. This will reflect poorly on your brand. By testing your equipment and technical setup ahead of time, you avoid this kind of problem. Most social media platforms let you set livestreams to private, enabling you to test your live event without any viewers. During this tech run, confirm that all your equipment works properly, especially your camera and microphone. Doing so also lets you confirm that the lighting is good and that your internet connection is stable. 

Don’t forget to record your livestream. This is a good practice for any livestream your small business does, as it lets you save the video onto your YouTube or social media page. The video can then turn into a reference for people who have common questions. You can even edit the video to shorter versions posted on social media, each addressing one question at a time.

Conclusion

A livestream Q&A will let you engage with your customers and create a sense of community. To maximize your chances of success, choose the channel that your audience prefers and promote the Q&A across all other channels. Prepare some questions and topics to cover ahead of time, but encourage interaction from the audience as well. Finally, be sure to record your livestream for valuable content you can reuse.