Live video’s authenticity builds engagement.

At the end of 2016, social media platforms added one of the most powerful customer engagement tools to your phone. You might not have used it yet. You might have dismissed it. You might have no idea what you can do with it.

You might be missing out.

One person who hasn’t been missing out is Ryan Steinolfson. The owner of a digital marketing agency in San Diego, Steinolfson is also an action sport enthusiast. He’d played around with GoPro when the small cameras came out but it was the ability to broadcast live on Periscope that really sparked his imagination.

“I thought, ‘Wow, you mean I can actually bring people along for the ride? In the moment?'” he recalled.

He built a small contraption that allowed him to fix his mobile phone just above his eyes and he did what he loves to do most when he’s not building digital marketing campaigns for his clients: he headed out onto the water.

He strapped a surfboard to his feet and a parachute to his back, pressed the Broadcast button on Periscope and started leaping off the waves, reaching as high as twenty feet in the air before crashing back into the Pacific Ocean.

That’s not the usual content that you’d expect to find in a marketing video–unless it’s for a kitesurfing company. When companies broadcast live, they’re most likely to talk directly to the camera, as Mark Zuckerberg likes to do, or take their customers behind the scenes of their business. There’s no connection at all between leaping off the top of waves with a parachute and building the Facebook audiences and traffic streams that Steinolfson does in his day job.

But Steinolfson saw a 20-40 fold increase in engagement during that broadcast. “People still talk about the kitesurfing videos,” he said. “They’re like when are we going to go kitesurfing again?”

Recorded video is a powerful way of delivering information to an audience. It can hold attention and spread easily. But live video adds a new level of excitement. It brings a touch of magic to video. Because it can be spontaneous and unplanned it brings audiences into your life and it shows them a brand that they know is authentic. Whether the video is being released by an individual or a brand, it shows audiences exactly who they are.

“It allows people to look into your life,” said Steinolfson. “That’s what creates the connections and that’s what helps with my business. People know me not just as the guy who does live videos or digital marketing but they know more about me than that because they were able to share a kite-surfing experience, jumping fifteen or twenty feet in the air.”

The challenge for brands is to dream up content that will work in a live video broadcast, but that content doesn’t have to be anything special. It’s enough to bring people into your life and show them who you are–even if you’re not using a parachute.

Listen to the complete interview with Ryan Steinolfson on the Fun Podcast on iTunes and Sticher