How to Broadcast a Live Video to Your Followers and Customers

Markets change, products change, and the online landscape keeps evolving each and every day. You have to stay fresh. There is nothing more current and ‘in-the-moment’ than a live broadcast, and it provides immediate contact and access to your customers and followers. I’ll show you how you can be broadcasting to anyone within moments and get your message heard right now!

In the online marketplace, you have to appear on the forefront of developments and trends, and sometimes that means creating content quickly and distributing it immediately. One very easy way to contravene this, which has a number of benefits, is a live broadcast. This may seem scary, and may seem like you would need all manner of tech to pull it off, but I assure you – nothing could be further from the truth.

There is nothing more current and ‘in-the-moment’ than a live broadcast, and it provides immediate contact and access to your customers and followers. You won’t need any special equipment – you probably have it all already (especially if you even have just a passing interest in video production.

So how do you do it?

Firstly, head over to USTREAM (http://www.ustream.tv), and click GO LIVE in the top right.

You will be prompted to sign up for a free account. Do so, and for now you can easily stick with a basic account (it will do everything you need to get up and running – if you want more from your service you may decide to go PRO, but I must say I have never been limited by what the basic package offers).

You will be asked to create a channel – just pick a name that seems appropriate (if it’s on behalf of a promotion, business or twitter account that usually fits pretty good)

When you done all the above, the broadcast window opens.

Here you can see I have blanked out certain details, but you get the idea of the broadcast control panel. This is the central hub of your broadcast, where you can control most anything you would need to for a simple broadcast.

Firstly, click the little settings and preferences button at the bottom right of the video pane. A bunch of options will pop up.

Here you can pick what camera you are going to broadcast from (if you have a webcam already connected it will go straight for that BUT you can connect another. If you have a HD camcorder, connect it via USB or Firewire to broadcast a better picture), and which microphone is going to provide the audio. Again it will go for the built in mic as a first port of call but if you have another you can hook it up to your computer and select it just as easy.

Resolution options are here also as well as ratio. I would add that the main importance here for us in the world of online marketing is connecting with our audiences, so I would stick to something moderate. A higher quality picture will command more bandwidth and Internet speed, and then your customers will be hit with the deadly buffer time. Keep it moderate to keep them watching – a broadcast with no interruptions is going to be watched a hundred times more than one that stops and starts.

When you have all your settings sorted, you can click on ‘Start Broadcast’ to go live, or ‘Start Record’ to record your content and it will be saved in your Ustream channel, and, much like YouTube, you can distribute and embed this video address to your heart’s content. For the sake of argument, let’s assume you click ‘Start Broadcast’.

Now one of the great things that Ustream does is enable easy sharing of your broadcast, as well as interaction with your viewers while broadcasting. On the right of the broadcast window is this panel.

Here, while broadcasting you can just click to share the video to Facebook or Twitter, to let people know you are live right now. This is perfect if you have thousands of followers – you can promote to thousands in a mere click. Plus, thanks to the sheer novelty value of a live broadcast, a lot of people WILL click.

You can also keep clicking on this share button throughout the broadcast to keep topping up your viewers and raising awareness. There is also the chat button, where you can interact with viewers while broadcasting. This is great for staying current, and also great for webinars. At the bottom there is also the address of the channel. You can send this to whomever you like, and when you click on it you will be taken here:

This is the channel homepage, where your viewers will enjoy your broadcast. If you are not broadcasting live at that moment, the channel is still active, with your previous recordings saved and looping, giving the impression of never-ending content. You can also embed this video window wherever you like – again, extremely useful, especially on a homepage. As you can see on the far right are the chat and social stream options, where your viewers can interact with yourself and others.

All in all, this is very easy and very useful. After a couple of broadcasts I assure you you will become more comfortable with both the excitement and the perceived stresses of a live broadcast. But it’s impact is undeniable, it’s directness of contact with your customers unquestionable, and it’s overall usefulness very strong indeed.

Author Bio: Charles West is a professional content writer and blogger since last 2 years. I have writing expertise in technology and certification topics specially. I love to share that recently I passed my 642-274 exam from SAS institute and 642-618 exam from VMware. Thanks for reading.