Recently, the team at my social enterprise tested Periscope. If you haven’t done it in your business or social sector organization, I suggest you give it a try. I can see the potential is great for this live streaming platform and you might be able to present your brand and the work you do in a whole new way.
What’s Periscope?
Periscope is a live stream video platform, plain and simple. When you’re live streaming video, you’re “scoping.” We know that across all digital marketing platforms and tools, it’s increasingly important to provide high quality content with visuals-including video. More and more, we’re moving toward optics as individuals, businesses and organizations try to cut through the thousands of posts, tweets and ads that everyone sees all day on the Internet.
Twitter developed Periscope and that’s very important. What that means is that your existing Twitter followers can be the same community that you engage with on Periscope. In other words, there’s no need to build another group of supporters. Just keep doing what you’re doing on Twitter to increase your followers and those who are on Periscope will automatically be connected to you when you join that platform.
Why Is Periscope Important?
Earlier this month Twitter said that it had over 1 million people logging on to see what it was and if you do, you can see how Periscope is a game-changer. It’s a cool tool and I suggest you check it out if you haven’t already. As individuals and brands use it and figure out it’s capabilities, it’s easy to see the potential.
You can live-stream anything from anywhere at anytime from your mobile device. As we have been testing it out, I’ve kept my notifications on so I can see different live streams and engage. Yes, I have seen people I follow when I’ve checked into a live stream show their dogs playing along the beach. That’s nice, but I’ve also seen brief interviews done with authors promoting their books done on the fly. Oprah has live streamed on it, pro sports athletes and countless others.
Periscope is important because the live streaming video has never been done quite like this before. So, let’s say your corporate team is running a 5K race now that we’re entering the summer for charity. You can live stream the run, interview some of the racers, chat about the corporation, the cause and anyone can see it in real-time.
There’s more to this, which makes it even better. Again, let’s focus on that 5K race as an example being scoped; individuals from anywhere around the world viewing it can text comments, in real time, which you can read and answer right there and then. Viewers can also “heart” your scope, think of it as a “like” feature. Talk about engagement! That’s powerful stuff.
It’s very early yet with Periscope and we’ll have to see how it goes. There is a potential downside to this technology, of course, with trolls or abusers. However, individuals and brands have to work with this every day and social media platforms are becoming more aggressive about dealing with abuse.
All in all, Periscope is a great leap forward on social media, and it’s worth testing it out. You’re really only limited by your own imagination on what you can scope, which would engage followers and help promote your brand.