How To Do a Live Streaming Webcast from Zoom to Social Media

2019_Toyota_Prius_Jack_Hollis_14_01D39249F06D33D7119EA55DADC97507EB68F8BE

Eric Schwartzman

I help #startups, change-ups & scale-ups pivot to #digitalmarketing Podcasts: http://ericschwartzman.com/prtw & http://ericschwartzman.com/b2blg SaaS founder & author

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The phone rang. It was Toyota digital marketing calling.

It was one of those phone calls that was exciting, scary and life-changing, all at the same time.

Mind you, this was many moons before coronavirus or on demand webinar services like Zoom, GoToMeeting and Google Hangouts existed.

In fact, it was before using live webinars as part of B2B content marketing campaign was popular, because it was still pretty tough technically to pull off.

Back then, live streaming video online was a risky proposition for even the slickest digital marketing consultant.

It was hard enough to get online marketing consultants to agree on what is a webinar, let alone agree on how best to produce webcasts vs webinars.

No Easy Way to Live Stream

Back to the phone call. The internet marketing team at Toyota was concerned.

In the past, they’d always revealed their new models exclusively for the news media at the Detroit Auto Show.

But the economy was in bad shape, and only a third of the press pool had pre registered to attend their press conference.

At this time, newspapers were canceling their Automotive sections all together.

Automotive advertisers were strapped for cash too, and the mainstream press has already started to feel the impact classified advertising defecting to digital media.

It no longer made sense to give their news exclusively to the mainstream media.

It was time to go direct to consumers with their news, much as the movie studios are doing these days with the movie theaters shut by COVID-19.

The financial meltdowns and pandemics accelerate digital transformation.

Dawn of Owned Media

My owned media marketing channel framework. Owned media should be the first step of an organic growth marketing campaign. Download this graphic.

If they wanted to get their news out broadly, Toyota would have to become a media company almost overnight, and they needed help.

Toyota Motors USA wanted to live stream the reveal of the new Prius online. They had no idea how many people would view concurrently. And they wanted my startup to produce the live internet broadcast.

And to make it even tougher, they didn't want it password protected. They wanted anyone to be able to watch the live stream on the internet.

Well it took a small army of engineers and a lot of sleepless nights, but my company did it. We took the live video feed via satellite and encoded and streamed it live to their website in near real time.

It was the world’s first live stream of an automotive reveal.

Someone posted a link to the stream on Digg, a popular social link sharing service at the time.

And we saw a huge spike in traffic.

But we managed to keep the stream and their website up, with the help of a team of streaming video specialists working behind the scenes.

The good news is, you don't need a streaming video team anymore. Now you can do it yourself.

Tools like Restream make it possible to simulcast live streaming events to multiple destinations at the same time.

Marketing in Times of Crisis

The risk of infection has resulted in the cancellation of nearly all B2B events like trade shows and conference.

Everyone is comfortable teleconferencing these days and digital marketing experts are experimenting with virtualizing real world events with live streaming video.

For example, Apple announced in March they’re going to live stream their next developer’s conference.

Virtual events are the new normal.

Live streaming from Zoom to Facebook

If you want to live stream from Zoom to Facebook, you can connect restream to zoom, Andre stream to Facebook.

Restream acts as a sort of middleware application. You move your Zoom event to restream and then divvy it up among as many social networking sites as you like from there.

You can stream to personal profiles or Facebook pages. And you can stream to multiple Facebook pages as well, as long as you have the right account level. The more you pay, the more destinations you can stream to simultaneously.

Facebook automatically archives the video of the Zoom live stream.

Live Streaming from Zoom to Twitter

Since Twitter doesn't accommodate live streams, you need to sign up for a Periscope account.

The Periscope account should be attached to your Twitter account.

Then when you simulcast the Zoom live stream to Periscope, it'll show up on Twitter as well.

Periscope automatically archives a copy of the live stream on Twitter as well.

Live Streaming from Zoom to LinkedIn

LinkedIn Live, which is a feature that allows user to live stream long form content, is still in beta and requires approval. To apply for access to LinkedIn Live fill out this form.

LinkedIn also archives your video as the post on your activity stream, so all video files live streamed from Zoom through Restream to LinkedIn remain on your profile indefinitely.

According to Linkedin, Linkedin Live streams get 24x more comments than video upload posts and 62% of companies plan to adopt live broadcasting in the future.

Live streaming from Zoom to YouTube

You can also live stream a Zoom meeting to YouTube through the Restream platform as well.

When you start live streaming, YouTube followers will get a notification that you’re live and the stream will be available on your channel.

The archive, however, will be available as a YouTube live video, although you can add that video to any playlist once it's done.

since it's hard to Beyond camera and live streaming, while promoting your stream on social networks at the same time, it's a good idea to have some help.

Ideally you want someone tweeting, Facebooking, and sharing on other social media that you're alive when you're live to try and get people to watch.

The nice thing about a livestream, is it tends to attract people together at the same time, since they want to participate while it's still alive. So live streaming is a way to leverage immediacy as part of your digital marketing program.

Live Streaming from Zoom to Restream

Attaching Restream to Zoom is quite simple. All you need to do is plug in aqui from restream. Here's an article that shows you how to do it.

Before you start your live stream on Zoom however, go to Restream and specify a title for the stream and a description of what you'll be discussing.

In the description field, make sure and include a link to a landing page where people watching the stream can take some sort of action, like sign up to attend live or download bonus content.

This will allow you to convert their interest into some sort of microtransaction.

If you live stream directly from Zoom through Restream to multiple social networks, you won't be able to use Facebook live or YouTube Live pre-scheduled Events. Instead you'll just go live on those networks and your followers will get a notification in their activity dream that you're live.

Conclusion

If you are producing B2B events on Zoom already or if you're keynoting events, it makes sense to extend the reach of those happenings to your social networking as well.

Compared to the amount of time it takes to produce a good online event, the incremental effort required to extend the reach via live streaming is nominal.

Plus you get the on-demand content which makes it discoverable through organic search after the fact.

Follow the steps in this post stream your Zoom meetings and webinars to as many social networks as you like.

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