In This series of posts, you’ll learn how to Brand Yourself With Live Streaming Video Platforms. There are a variety that have become popular in the last year or two. In today’s post, we’ll look at Periscope.

Periscope is a social media app that you download to your phone (mobile phones). This service lets you stream live or broadcast whatever it is you’re currently doing.  That could be something like showing off your business advice or sharing your day to day life. For example, broadcast from your local coffee shop, sitting outside your house, at the library, or wherever you tend to work from – talking about whatever you can that puts you on common ground with your audience.

It’s an interactive platform, which means that you can receive feedback and engage with people as you’re hosting your video. When you’re finished with your broadcast, people can still interact with it for up to a day. As long as you save whatever you’ve broadcast, you’ll still be able to use it later. But if you don’t save the video, then you can’t.

The good news is that Periscope can be accessed through your Twitter account. So if you have a large following on Twitter, you’ll be able to tweet your broadcast to a worldwide audience. Once you sign into Periscope, you can view a broadcast or send one. 

You’ll be given the ability to follow others on the app and you’ll see when they’re live streaming. You’ll also be given a chance to see the live streams that have been broadcast recently. Your own followers will get to see when you’re live and when you recently broadcast. 

When conversation bubbles pop up on the screen, that’s your audience engaging with you in real time. When people like the broadcast, they’ll “heart it” and you’ll see those hearts on the screen.

The platform is easy to use. When you’re ready to create a video, you simply hit the tab for broadcasting and select the Broadcast Now button. When you get ready to create your video, you have to enable the camera and the microphone and give your video a title.

The third button is location. You can either enable or disable that feature. This does let people know where you’re broadcasting from. Some people turn this feature off to keep their location hidden.

You can also lock your broadcast and it will limit your audience. Instead of your video being worldwide, it will only be available to the people who are your followers. This feature can be extremely handy if you’re selling a course where you’re teaching students and you only want paying students in the broadcast. 

If you’re sharing a product launch and only want your joint venture partners to know about it, then you would make it private. Once you’ve created your video, you can put it on Twitter or on Facebook. 

Then it’s all over, you can judge how many audience members engaged with the video. It will show you things like how many viewers you had and how long they watched the video versus how long the video was. This can help you see if you’re holding your audience’s attention or not. If not, review your video and find out where your branding is lacking.

Are you making it all about you – or about your viewers’ needs?

Here are some people that might be good to follow on Periscope if you join.