When it comes to the Twitter basics for live stream, if you do nothing else, just do the first two steps and you will be set up & ahead of the crowd. These two steps are key as the information you provide, on Twitter, in these steps are pulled through to the Periscope & Blab platforms, this saves you time. Who doesn’t want to save time! Not sure if it’s worth your while spending much time on Twitter? Check out these stats.

Egg heads

I can not stress enough the importance of having a face to a name. When you are livestreaming you are putting your face out there, don’t hide it in your marketing – or make people guess when you want to go live. The best thing is that candid shots work just as well as polished professional headshots. You are building a relationship live, so make sure the photo is bright and inviting. People enjoy the authenticity of live streaming, so showing them what you look like before you engage with you starts that relationship. Additionally, one photo across platforms means that you have consistency in branding.

Description

This one can be a little daunting, but consider it a preparatory physical challenge before you jump headlong into Twitter. Your description/biography can only contain 160 characters. Now this includes letters, spaces, emojis & links. Before you say, why should I have all of those, let me explain why you should have them all.

Emojis will allow your biography to stand out on the Periscope user list. While you can edit your biography independently on Periscope, uniqueness and demonstrating your personality on Twitter gives you a point of difference and sets you apart from the noisy Twitter crowd.

While you can list your website in Twitter, having a distinct link on your site for your Twitter followers will give you the numbers on how many people have followed you from that platform. You can even give them a thank you gift for coming across.

Cover image

Your Twitter cover/header image is a valuable piece of real estate. It is you main & constant opportunity to advertise yourself, your brand, and your offer. I use Canva to design most of my advertising material as it has them preformatted to the correct dimensions. I can upload my own images & logo to use on them, or I can use the set dimensions and design it from scratch.

Title length

When you livestream, it is good practice to keep the titles to 80 characters. The reason is that when your streams are shared or tweeted the platform will add a link or other content. You want to be the one controlling the title & not relying on the person sharing to accurately edit your title.

Additionally, on Blab you should ensure that the first 40 characters of the title are carry the information. As you accept people on to the screen & your Blab is tweeted out, the platform will shorten the title from the end for the sake of including the twitter handle of all participants.

Promote the stream

When you are livestreaming, especially running a scheduled Blab, I suggest making a specific graphic to share on Twitter. In this graphic include the time, title, participants if it’s an interview, and a shortened link to the livestream.

Using a graphic like this means you then have the 140 characters of the tweet to add additional information, including relevant hashtags. It’s also more appealing to Twitter followers than straight text, statistics show that images are also retweeted more often. Using an image with the relevant details prevents retweeters from editing the core information.

I suggest retweeting the image in the lead up to the livestream, to capture audiences who may not have seen the original tweet. Another way to increase exposure is to pin your tweet to the top of your profile. Done the same way as on Facebook, this means that your livestream is the first tweet visitors will read when looking through your profile.

Conversations

As always, Twitter is a social media platform & that means that you need to be sociable. Thank people for tweeting out or sharing your livestreams. Interact with them if they joined a seat in your Blab. Take the discussion on to Twitter to deepen your relationship with those who took the time to spend time with you in your livestream. You can read more about using Twitter conversations to help build relationships formed on live streaming, here.

Fullscope.tv

If you are looking for ways to easily interact with your Periscope followers, then can I suggest Fullscope.tv. It is an analytics tool that shows you the statistics around your scope & also allows you to tweet to them from within the tool. So, you can tweet to your top sharers, commenters, or the ones who left the most hearts. You can also respond to particular commenters regarding something they said on your scope. This is truly a tool worth investigating if you want to leverage the power of periscopes on Twitter.

Twitter Basics Checklist

I understand that there are a lot of different things that I am suggesting. That’s why I have created the following Twitter basic checklist. It quickly covers all the things you need to do. Download it, refer back to this blog & video

Blab – Twitter basics for live stream

If you would like to see what I discussed on the Blab, or if you prefer to learn by listening, then watch the following video training on – Twitter Basics for Live Streaming.

 

Post Script (September 2017)

Blab is no longer available, thankfully most of my videos are and are available on Youtube.

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