How to Use Video Live Streamed Events to Grow Your Podcast Audience

Live concerts are more exciting than listening to music by yourself, right? The same is true for video live streaming event for podcasts. Running a video live streaming event can help you build up the right kind of audience for your podcast but it needs to be planned well to avoid burn out. In April 2021, I ran a series of 4 weekly live events for one of my podcasts and I’d like to share the things I learned with you. I want to save you time and stress so you can enjoy your live streamed events.

We’ll go over how to:

• set up your video live streaming event
• gain audience members at every step of promoting your event
• structure the live event (time, content & chat room)
• track your audience growth

Set Up Your Live Streaming Video Event

A live streaming video event can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. It requires different tools than a video podcast or an audio live podcast. First, you need to decide what kind of video live streaming event you want to create. As with everything else in podcasting, keep it simple the first time you do it.

Types of Video Live Streaming Events

There are many types of video live streaming events that you can use for your event. The most popular types are live recording of your regular episodes, a celebration event like a podversary (podcast anniversary), and a listener question and answer event. No matter which one of these you decide to do, the information in this post will help you.

Cost of Video Live Streaming Platforms

There are many live streaming platforms available these days. Here are a few that you’ll hear Podcasters discussing in any online space.

• Streamyard: free, $20 and $39 monthly plan
• Squadcast: $40, $100 and $300
• Restream: free, $19 and $49
• Riverside: $9, $19, $29 and enterprise

TIP: Check for a free trial on any platform you’re thinking of using. And do a test interview or episode to make sure that both you and your guests are able to use the platform easily.

Gain Audience at Every Step

You want the right listeners to find your podcast and become a part of your community, so invite them in at every opportunity. But once you attract them, you’ve got to lead them to your podcast.

Some way to attract podcast audience members during your event promotions includ:

1. Call for guests: Post a call for panelists on Facebook groups, list serves and social media with links to my newsletter OR podcast in them. With a simple and clear call to action (CTA), of course.
2. Announce the event: Announce the live streaming event details across social media mentioning (@ ing) all of the participants. In each post, include a link to your podcast.
3. Track tickets: “Sell” tickets on Eventbrite to gain more exposure and build create another way to communicate with your live audience. Ticket prices include a free option.

How to Structure the Live Event

Use Time Segments

In 60 minutes you can have a relaxed pace and still provide a lot of value for your viewers. try structuring the time into segments. For example, here is my tentative time schedule with 10 minute time blocks:

introduction, topic 1, topic 2, topic 3, topic 4, and closing.

TIP: Adjust the above segment times for the amount of people in both the conversation and the chat room. The more people that are involved, the less segments you’ll have time for.

Make Chat Room Decisions

You’ll need to make a chat room decision before going live. Will you bring questions into the conversation as they appear in the live chat OR at the end of the event? Both of these formats work but you’ll need to pick one. And let your audience know at the beginning of the event.

TIP: If it’s your first live streaming event, you can say something like “Feel free to add questions to the chat room anytime and we’ll get to them as we can.” This way, you’ll have the flexibility to bring the questions into the conversation OR answer them at the end. It will also help with segment timing.

Plan Your Topics

It’s always better to have too many ideas instead of not enough. The audience won’t know if you didn’t do something but they catch on fast if there is an awkward silence because you ran out of content.

But don’t worry, you don’t have to plan your topics alone. Get your guests involved. I shared my topics with my live streaming guests early on and asked them all to add 1 topic of their own to the list.

Audience Growth Tracking

It’s important to be clear in how your want to grow your audience when planning your live event. For my live events in April, I was focused on building my podcast newsletter subscribers. So I followed my subscriber number closely throughout the planning and live events. I’m happy to report that the newsletter was able to more than double our subscribers within that month. We started at 34 subs and ended at 75, all while maintaining a high open rate.

Here are some other ways you can track your audience growth. Remember, pick 1 and track it from the planning process all the way through the live event itself.

• podcast download growth
• YouTube subscriber or views count
• number of live event attendees
• number of ticket holders on Eventbrite
• number of private messages (DMs on socials and emails)
• number of comments for a social media posts about the event

Gain the Right Listeners by Going Live

With a little bit of planning, you can create a live streaming event for your podcast that can help you gain the right listeners. Not only will you gain more listeners but you will get to know them on a deeper level because of the engagement aspect of live events. So start planning your first live streaming podcast event today!