How To Use YouTube Live Streaming To Grow Your Channel

Learn how you can use live streaming on YouTube to your advantage and discover the 9 important ways that you can use to grow your audience via live streams.

If you are looking to grow your channel as a YouTuber, then you probably know a couple of ways recommended by experts and you have probably tried a few yourself. 

Well, there’s a sure way to grow your channel faster than you thought, and that is through YouTube live streaming.

In this article, we will show you what you need to do in order to achieve this and how you can use YouTube live streaming to grow your channel. 

Let’s get started. 

How to use YouTube live streaming to grow your channel?

There are multiple ways through which you can grow your channel through live streaming such as going live when your audience is online, optimizing your live streams, creating live streams teasers, engaging your audience on chat, promoting your live stream, adding captions, tagging locations, building a community, and being entertaining. 

Can You Grow Your Channel From Streaming Live On YouTube?

Yes, you can. Your channel’s growth depends on your audience growth, what this means is that if you engage better with your audience, you automatically increase the chances of growing and developing your community of followers, and what this will do in return is increase the number of views you get on your video and also open the gates to your higher earnings. 

If you are wondering if live streams can help you grow and increase your channel, then read this to the end. 

Live stream happens to be one of the features that have a very positive impact on the overall potential of your channel if you just use it correctly. 

Thinking about it, it’s easy to understand why. 

This is where live streaming comes in as one of the best ways you can connect with your audience. 

The truth is that users on YouTube are always looking for real reactions and connections from real people and real-life situations. 

There’s no better way to say it, just get in front of the camera and start recording live. 

You should start your live streaming or continue it because you do not need to edit. 

You can just create videos on the go without complicating things. 

You can also increase your number of uploads at any time and at any place. 

The live stream also encourages community development because with the use of open chats, your fans can interact live with each other and this makes it even more fun. 

Plus, this can also increase your promotional opportunities on YouTube. 

These are all great reasons to start or continue your YouTube live streaming.  

Here’s how to go about it.

1. Go Live When Your Audience Is Online

You want to make sure that you are going live when your audience is online

You don’t want to make the mistake of going live when your audience is offline. 

When you decide to go online, you want to be sure that there will be people online to watch your live stream, this is because the chances are slim that people will want to watch it later. 

Besides, your analytics can show you the magic and show you that it’s best to have your audience engage on your live stream while the video is recorded and not later on. 

When you are live streaming, you want to make sure that people are able to join your live stream because if they do not, the purpose is defeated. 

YouTube makes it possible to track when your users or audience are online. 

That way, you can tell when you should be going live and when you should not.

2. Optimize Your Live Stream In Advance

Just maybe a few days before your live video or streaming your live video, you can optimize your website and your YouTube channel’s SEO to best fit with the keywords from your video. 

This will help you immensely. 

How? By helping to improve your ranking on search engines and growing your YouTube live stream audience as well. 

While it may not seem like it, little or minor adjustments to your entire content have a way of helping you to increase your positioning and hopefully even attract more viewers to your channel.  

3. Create A Live Stream In Advance

You can also do your live stream in advance. 

What this means is that you upload it, then schedule it, so people get to watch it when it is due, just as if you were going live at that same moment. 

You can do this if you want to stream a pre-recorded video and everybody can watch it at the same time. 

If for instance, your YouTube premier is going live by 9:00 am, you can go live an hour before then and tell your audience what to expect, get them to share what they expect, and also tell them the story behind your premier so they have a sense of connection and do not want to miss it.

This helps to build excitement around your activity and gets your audience engaged while preparing them for what is coming. 

This way, you carry them along in the process and ensure that their anticipation is raised and the chances of passivity among them are slim. 

Again, remember that this helps tremendously to grow your audience and your channel as well. 

From time to time, you can create your stream in advance, schedule it, and then get your audience to watch it when it is released

This gives you ample time to prepare what you want to present and helps to not put you under unnecessary stress or pressure. 

It also helps you know what you need to do to create and maintain audience participation. 

4. Engage Your Audience On Chat

You should also make sure you check your chat after your stream ends

This is made possible, thanks to one of YouTube Live’s features, chat replay. 

With chat replay, you can have the ability to follow your viewers’ conversations after your live stream has ended. 

That way, you are now able to read the chats the exact same way they appeared live during your session when you playback the video. 

When you have finished your live stream, make sure to re-watch it so that you can keep up with the chats on the live video. 

Do well to read the comments so you can see what your viewers liked about the video, what they would want you to do better, and what they would like to see in your future streams. 

5. Promote Your Livestream 

You should make sure you make it easy for viewers to discover your live stream. 

You can do this by promoting your Livestream. 

When it comes to Livestream, promotion is key to getting discovered. 

Promotion is the way you create a buzz and get the word out about your channel. 

When you give your fans a pre-notice about your live video, you increase the likelihood that they will watch it. 

You can also use your channel description to promote the date, time, and topic or add the promo to your channel banner. 

Also make sure you create your title, description, and thumbnail in a way that your live stream can be easily discovered once you go live. 

When on social media, make sure you build teasers with a highlight and create a countdown towards your Livestream so your audience can anticipate it with you. 

Remember that you can schedule your live stream in advance on mobile or webcam, then you share the date, time, and URL on your social media to build anticipation. 

During the live stream, you should know that your fans who subscribe to your channel can opt to get notifications when you go love. 

They can decide to go from the receive email notification for some or all of your live streams. 

You should also know that your stream may get surfaced to potential viewers on search results, on the YouTube homepage, and on suggested videos as well.

After your Livestream, YouTube will automatically archive your Livestream. 

This is done intentionally so that people can always find it and watch it later. 

Ensure that you give your fans the opportunity to see this video on demand and get them prepped and excited about your next live stream. 

You should also do well to share this video on your other social media platforms. 

You must announce your Livestream on social media

What this means is that when you begin to promote your YouTube live in advance, announcing it on all your social media platforms is a great way to boost your audience. 

Of course, not all your followers on the gram will subscribe to your channel and not every follower on Facebook will do the same, but still, you can increase your audience by doing this. 

You can publish multiple promotional posts, spread out to each day of the week. 

You should also make sure to create each post according to the social media type that you are using. 

For instance, Twitter is brief and straight to the point, so short-form content is more suitable for this, unlike Facebook which supports long-form content. 

Also make sure that you encourage people to engage by liking, sharing, and commenting on your posts. 

6. Add Captions To Expand Your Reach

You can also use captions on your videos to help you expand your reach. 

This helps your audience understand better what you are saying or will be saying in the video. 

These days, viewers can automatically turn on English captions on YouTube live. 

While the auto-captions may not be so perfect, this is a huge step in the right direction to making the stream accessible to everyone. 

Also, tagging your location on your live videos and streams lets viewers able to find you by that location. 

You can check out the tagged locations on the watch page of any of your videos. 

When viewers see the tag on any of your public, unlisted, or private videos you share with them, they can click location to search for public videos from the same location. 

Captioning on YouTube was previously impossible unless the creators created or provided the captions themselves, which happened to be an expensive set-up. 

Thankfully, the auto-caption is here, and everyone can take advantage of it, including you. 

7. Location Tag

You can also go mobile and tag your location when you are live streaming on the go. 

Tagging is very helpful, it allows you to share all your favorite hotspots with your fans and viewers. 

With this feature, followers or viewers can also use the new location feature to explore other videos from you. 

Thanks to YouTube’s addition of the Geotag feature, your location-tagged videos also open you up to the other option of having viewers explore your channel better since clicking on the location will send them to a page with videos shared from the same location. 

This tool also has the ability or filter that enables users to search for a specific video by location.

8. Build A Community

You can also build a community with YouTube live. 

When it comes to Live video on YouTube, it is quite interesting because YouTube is all about videos. 

When you make live videos, you create an obvious platform for your audience to engage with your video and with each other, thereby building a community right on your channel.

Using Livestream is a great way to engage and have real-time with your audience. 

Channels that grow really fast make sure to use live videos to engage with their audience, whether it is for the purpose of answering questions or it is simply to share important information with their audience. 

They understand the human need for real connections and they use this to their advantage. 

Live videos help you to bring people to your audience because they get to see a notification that you are going live, and that spikes their curiosity to want to go see what you will be talking about or sharing. 

Another great thing is that going on a live video to answer questions and share value establishes you as a thought leader and makes you a valuable creator, so people will want to follow you and hear from you more often.

Livestreaming builds your community fast and authentically. 

This is because you don’t just get to talk to the people, but you’re interacting with them in real-time and you get to understand their fears, ambitions, and pain points. 

9. Don’t Be Boring

This is important especially when you are just starting out. 

It’s really important that you do not think of yourself as a small YouTube channel

Think of yourself instead as a content creator, regardless of how many subscribers or views you may have at the moment. 

This is because whatever you churn out now is adding to form your content library and even though you don’t have a large following now when you eventually do, you will not get a chance to undo what you did not do well. 

Don’t look at the size of your audience, this can limit you and make you put out uninspiring and boring content. 

See yourself as the creator who shows up, bringing value to millions of people and this will help you deliver better. 

Conclusion

These are the ways you can use YouTube live streaming to grow your channel. 

Hoping you found this article helpful.

Leave us a comment! 

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