As a leading public relations agency and marketing communications firm in Orange County, we like to keep a keen eye on which businesses are using social media channels to their advantage. Live video streaming is the latest hot thing in social media marketing, driven by the launch of Twitter’s Periscope app in 2015 and, more recently, Facebook Live. Any good public relations agency will be urging their clients to explore how best to make use of live streaming. Here are three great examples that have caught our eye.
- Buzzfeed’s watermelon madness – In April last year Buzzfeed streamed live video of two safety-goggled experimenters seeing how many rubber bands they could put around a watermelon before it exploded. It was a wacky idea, and probably not the first strategy a marketing communications firm might be expected to suggest, but in the 45 minutes (and 686 rubber bands) it took to explode that watermelon, the stream attracted a peak of 807,000 viewers – more than any other video on Facebook Live at that time.
- General Electric’s drone showcase – According to the Forbes Global 2000, General Electric is the world’s 14th largest public company, and an innovative approach to marketing and branding is at the heart of that success. In 2015, GE showcased its operations with #DRONEWEEK, a live Periscope stream over five days in which drones toured GE facilities. In the words of GE’s director of innovation, Sam Olstein: “Drone Week allows us to showcase five different sites and five industries to give people a really cool perspective and peek at some of the stuff they don’t see often but does have an impact on their lives.”
- Dunkin’ Donuts’ virtual music festival – When Dunkin’ Donuts wanted to promote its Dunkin’ Iced Coffee in the summer of 2015, it teamed up with Spotify to organize five music concerts – in Boston, Chicago, Miami, New York and Philadelphia – by emerging artists. Each of the DD Summer Soundtrack shows was live streamed on Periscope, and the campaign was a triumph of social media marketing that any public relations agency would be proud of–sharing content across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Spotify, Twitter, Vine and YouTube.
Regardless of the industry you are in, live video streaming can help you grow your audience and increase business. Don’t be left behind, stream live today.