Sohnia Butt, MSc Digital Marketing Management student

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As of right now, there are a total of 2.9 billion social network users around the globe. Therefore, it is essential that businesses stay ahead of their competition by building up their social media presence to reach a wider audience. However, thanks to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, live content is the fastest growing segment of internet video traffic in the past 3 years.

Instagram live gives you a perfect platform that will help businesses to engage with their customers. When doing this, you are establishing a relationship and building customer loyalty through the process of connecting with your audience in a quick and easy manner. However, like any relationship goes, engaging and having the ability to build a strong relationship with your audience and customer base can take some time.

Answering questions and queries through live videos are not enough to build customers trust in you, as a brand, you must make customers feel wanted by asking them what THEY want FROM YOU, instead of assuming that through appearing on live videos every now and then will make them stay loyal to your company.

Businesses can engage customers through their Live streaming options through adding them to their live videos with the “Add a guest” feature, this way businesses can add their audience to their live videos for a chat and to answer questions directly that customers will ask them.

This will have a significant impact on the business sales because it will make customers feel comfortable, through them having the ability to ask questions directly to business employees and owners, without feeling like they are being invasive or annoying.

Businesses making use of live streaming will help to boost popularity through building a hype for events the business might be holding. The business might decide to hold an event for a new product/service launch, what better way to promote the launch? Through Live streaming, of course!

People who do not follow the company page on social media sites will also be aware of the event, due to people sharing it and live videos and stories appearing on the Instagram explore page. This is the perfect tool for businesses to make use of so that once people are aware of the company and the events it holds, they will make sure to follow them on their social media pages for future reference.

To make sure that consumers are aware that you are about to go live, one of the things to do is turn on the “Send Notifications” toggle in your video settings, this will send a notification to your followers that you have started a live video, so that wherever you go they will be aware that you have started your live!

As well as making sure your audience can see your live video, in order to well and truly grab the attention of the audience, make sure to add a catchy title on the video so that customers will be interested in seeing your video, which will increase the popularity of the business as a whole!

Instagram and Facebook live have worked wonders for companies that initially began by operating via social media, this works out extremely well for clothing companies such as Pretty Little Thing, who operate heavily on their social media sites! They do this by getting social media influencers to take over their live videos for the day to promote their new, seasonal clothing and deals that they have available at that time.

A recent study found that 80% of people would much rather watch live videos from brands than read a blog, and 82% would prefer to watch live videos than looking at posts on social media. This tells us that businesses need must make sure that promoting through live streaming on their social media sites is something that they do on a regular basis.

Live streaming should be done at prime times of the day to ensure that their followers will more than likely be available to tune in to their lives at that time, certain times of the day people are more active on their social media times are Wednesday through to Saturday at 10am till 8pm; other prime times to post with high engagement include Wednesday at 11am, Friday from 11am, 12pm and 2pm, and Saturday at 6pm to 8pm.