Getting set up for LinkedIn Livestreams

Getting set up for LinkedIn Livestreams

I've just started livestreaming bi-weekly conversations with Cory Lebson and Amanda Stockwell.

After just a couple of episodes (yeah, I'm not exactly a seasoned veteran), here are some hints for other folks who are planning on doing the same thing. I wanted to write them down before this all became second nature.

Promoting your stream

  1. Create a location to promote and host your livestreams. LinkedIn just started providing a placeholder post that you can use to promote your livestreams before they start. This is useful for creating some buzz around each session before you go live, and giving people a link they can come back to. There's still no "place" previous episodes live (other than in your Posts history). If you want to do any meaningful promotion around your stream, you'll probably need somewhere more permanent to point people to. We created a site (https://stickynotes.chat) in Wordpress.
  2. Decide a (hopefully unique) hashtag you'll use for promoting everything. We use #stickynoteschat. Did you know that you can "Follow" hashtags? Hashtags have their own URL so you can point to them, and they are a great archive for everything to do with your livestream.?
  3. Use the power of Followers. Encourage people to follow you as a Call To Action in posts promoting your livestream and in the livestream itself. When you go live, all your followers receive a "[Person] is now live" pop-up notification. It's a really powerful traffic driver.
  4. If you have multiple presenters/hosts, you might want to maximize your audience by rotating who hosts the livestream week-on-week.?This is a dumb-ass workaround for a feature that I really really hope gets added soon, where more than one person's followers can be notified for a single livestream.
  5. I added a new job title to the Experience section of my profile. I'm now officially a Livestream Presenter. That gives me another consistent location to raise awareness that we're doing this.?It's a nasty hack, but the LinkedIn platform isn't really set up to help you promote this type of thing.?
  6. We created a company page on LinkedIn for our broadcast, but we decided not to stream from that page because it has very few followers (so we'd miss out on the "[Person] is live" notifications). The external website is much more useful because we have full control over how it looks and we can post more content types to it.?

Getting a handle on the broadcast software

  1. If you want to use StreamYard as your broadcast software (and I recommend you do), sign up from https://streamyard.com/linkedinlive (this is the link from LI's documentation, not my affiliate link) to get a 30-day trial of the premium features. That way, you have no watermark, you can stream to more than one destination, and things just work smoother (no upgrade nags).?At the end of the trial period, if you signed up this way StreamYard will give you a lifetime discount on the annual fee. It was ~20% if I recall so well worth it.?
  2. If you have several hosts (not guests, hosts), they should all use the signed-in version of StreamYard rather than the guest version. That way, the person who isn't speaking can "drive" the UI to put overlays on the screen, change camera views, and so on.?
  3. If you don't have several hosts, it might help to have another person behind the scenes doing this "driving" of when to put the overlays ("bottom thirds" in the industry terminology) on the screen, and also potentially greeting viewers in the chat, pasting URLs you mention into the chat so they're clickable, and flagging important questions to you.
  4. Stream to YouTube as well. YouTube gives you stuff that you can't get from the LinkedIn platform (yet). An archive. Embeddable videos. Closed Captions. Transcripts (kinda-sorta if you copy them from the closed caption editor). We use it as a hosting platform for embedding videos on our site. We're also getting a tiny amount of organic traffic to that location. Note that you need a paid StreamYard account to stream to two locations.
  5. If you are setting up a YouTube channel for streaming, you'll want to do it several days before you first plan on going live. They have a 24-hour turn-around for switching on the livestreaming thing, but it took more like 48 hours for us and so we couldn't livestream our first session. You'll also need >100 subscribers to your YouTube channel before you can give it a custom name, so start telling people to subscribe if you don't want to have to direct them to a URL like youtube.com/channel/UCkIGTLOahuug75GfOeWubyg/live which ain't too memorable.
  6. Consider adding your previous livestreams to the "Featured" section of your profile. Otherwise, they just basically disappear into your posts archive.?I'm guessing that's a result of the LI metaphor that everything must live under a profile or a page. Please LinkedIn Live product managers, break that metaphor! Give us a usable archive location for livestream episodes that has its own URL.?One issue - the post associated with the livestream doesn't show a thumbnail when it's in the "Featured" section, so it isn't visually appealing.

Looking and sounding your best

  1. Watch a LinkedIn Learning course on video lighting. I'd start with Learning Video Lighting (Mark Gray), and The Art of Video Interviews (Amy DeLouise et al). I've found that a small investment in lighting that you also know how to place well can make a big difference.?
  2. I used free software to hook my DSLR camera to my computer via USB and use it instead of a webcam. Having shallow depth of field from a nicer lens makes a big difference because you can blur out the background to make it less distracting. It was a pain to get the software working, but it's worth it!?Update: there's now good Webcam software from most manufacturers, and I bought a cheap HDMI-to-USB adapter (details below).
  3. The alternative to blurring out your background is to use a green screen. StreamYard has a feature to replace your green background with a picture of your choice. Learn how to use one in this LinkedIn Learning course on Green Screen Techniques (Abba Shapiro et al),
  4. Use earbuds with a microphone attached, a headset with a microphone, a Lavalier mic, or a very directional microphone. This stops the tinny echo you get from using your computer microphone. Podcasting mics aren't so great for livestreaming because they normally need to be close enough to your mouth that they'll show up in the shot.

Updated: If you want to use a DSLR a a webcam (better image quality, shallow depth of field blurs your background), here are the utilities provided by different manufacturers:

  • Canon (Mac and Windows)
  • Fuji (Mac and Windows)
  • Panasonic (Mac and Windows)
  • Sony (Mac and Windows)
  • Nikon (Mac and Windows)
  • If you have HDMI-out on your camera, and it lets you display a "clean" feed without the camera information superimposed, then you can use an HDMI-to-USB dongle like this cheap one from Amazon (affiliate link). They are so inexpensive that I have two of these - one at home, and one in my travel bag.
  • There's also a ($40) Mac app that connects many different digital cameras, some even wireless.

It's addictive

We chose a bi-weekly cadence for live episodes. We pretty soon went weekly instead. We aren't getting a massive number of live viewers, but people have kept watching the episodes after the event, and we've been surprised by the level of engagement.

It's also exciting to be able to connect more directly with people and get instant feedback from them. And this comment is coming from an absolute introvert!

If you're planning on starting your own LinkedIn Live livestream, leave comments to let me know how it goes and whether you have more tips that I should add to this list.

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Massive thanks to Ray Villalobos for helping us out with our setup. Some of these tips are actually his in disguise!

I've added a couple of links to LinkedIn Learning videos. If you click on them and subsequently sign up for a free month's trial, I might get a small commission (at no cost to you).

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