Live Streaming: Tips and Tricks to help you get started

Strategy Talks is a social media strategy TALK SHOW, hosted by Dorien Morin-van Dam. Dorien was joined by her third guest, Julie Riley to showcase Julie's tips and tricks for live streaming. Julie is the social media manager at StreamYard, the tool that lets you stream to all major social platforms simultaneously directly from your browser.

Below, please find the 20-minute video + full transcript.

TRANSCRIPT

Dorien:

Hello everybody. My name is Dorien Morin-van Dam. And if you're watching this Live, thank you so much for joining me and my guest, Julie Riley. Today, we are going to talk about live streaming. I'm so excited to have Julie on as my guest today because it took me a long time to get started with this show. And even though I know so many tips and tricks, I'm excited to learn more from Julie. If you're watching here live, make sure you let us know where you're watching us from and on what channel. We're going live on Facebook in our group, on YouTube, on Twitter, and of course on LinkedIn. So if you're watching this on the replay, put in hashtag replay, so we know that you're watching this. And if you have questions, of course, ask them and we'll try to answer them live. So let me bring in Julie. Hi, Julie.

Julie:

Hello.

Dorien:

I'm so excited to have you here. And if you're listening to this podcast, it's Julie Riley. Riley's R-I-L-E-Y. If you want to look her up. Julie, let me just go ahead and read your bio so everybody knows who you are, Julie. Julie Riley is a social media manager for StreamYard, and she loves everything about marketing. Yay. She has been working in digital marketing since 2007 while working at a Harley Davidson dealer. Since then, she's worked with many different projects, including owning a social media marketing agency. Her experience includes e-commerce, SEO, social media, marketing chatbots live video. The list goes on. Julie has received awards from the American Marketing Association, Wichita Chapter, in 2019 as Marketer of the Year. Was nominated for the 2019 women who lead program, by the Wichita Business Journal and was nominated for small business of the year by Small Business Association. Julie, that's a lot of accolades. That's awesome.

Julie:

Thank you. It was a crazy ride that year. It was all 2019 and it kind of all just went crazy. It was awesome though.

Dorien:

That's that's great. Right now you are the social media manager first StreamYard. So let's get started. StreamYard, live streaming, they go together. So we're not going to beat around the bush there. I use StreamYard for this new show, and I've been using StreamYard for about two years to stream live weekly for one of my clients into a Facebook group. So I'm very familiar with the tool. When I wanted to start my show, I was like, "StreamYard all the way." So let's talk a little bit about what StreamYard is, what it does, and then we'll go right into tips. So we've got about 20 minutes today. If you're listening to this on the podcast, 20 minutes of listening, the best tools for Live Streaming, and of course podcasting. Because with this tool, you can also get audio files. So, Julie, I'm going to let you talk. Go ahead.

Julie:

So the tagline, the easiest way, is to say StreamYard is the easiest way to create professional-looking live streams. Okay. So that's the fancy way of saying, with StreamYard, you can add in your professional branding. You can create this look like what you have with the background, with your logo, without it just being you on Facebook or you on Twitch or you on YouTube without all of the look that really steps that stream up. It allows you to have the intro video as you did with your count timer. But, where the magic really happens with it is that you can multistream. So there are lots of tools out there that can do this. I'm going to be biased and say, this is my favorite, of course. But, what it will allow you to do is stream to Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook groups, Facebook pit profiles.

I know I'm missing a couple in there, but you can also then connect RTMP, which is... I cannot think of what it stands for. It's a long thing, but basically what that does is allow you to then push out to other places that can pull in a stream. So like Amazon Live, things like that. You get all of your comments in. So if somebody's commenting on Facebook and then somebody's commenting on YouTube, you don't have to then have separate devices open trying to read the comments on each of those devices and looking wherever you're trying to see them all at. They're bringing them all right into the studio.

You can bring those comments up on the screen. You can interact and talk with your audience. So it creates this two-way conversation across multiple platforms. And then like you said, if you're a podcaster, it allows you to not only download your audio but download the individual audio tracks. So, if you had a guest whose mic settings weren't quite high enough, or they were too high and you needed to do some post-production adjustments, or you needed to go edit something out, you have those individual audio files that you can do all of that with. And it just makes it so much easier. And we want this to be simple and not complicated because there are some live streaming tools out there that are very complicated. I say you don't need an engineering degree for this one.

Dorien:

Yeah. For those of you that are watching or listening or for the replay. So for somebody who's been a user for about two years. So as soon as this show is over, right, as soon as Julie and I hit the end broadcast button, I can go to my past shows. There's a tab right here in StreamYard that allows me to download this video file or audio file. And then I can start repurposing, right? Because yes, live streaming is all about the Live and getting the comments and knowing where people are from. Good morning, we have a... So we're going to demonstrate what you were just saying.

So there's a comment, and boom, we can bring it up onscreen. Somebody on LinkedIn is watching live, says, good morning. And then you can have that conversation with people. So, Julie, we've really wanted to bring this back to basics. We were in the green room discussing this. It took me four years of doing this for a client in a private Facebook group to finally say, "Guess what? I'm just going to do this. And show my audience how it's done." Give business live streaming tips, social media tips. Talk about content strategy, and live streaming is a content strategy, correct?

Julie:

Yes, definitely. You know, and it's one of those that I think should be a part of everybody's content strategy, because there's so much you can do with it. And I've heard so many business and people say, but I don't really have anything to talk about. My business is boring. Let me tell you, I have a very good friend, Roger Wakefield. I know there are a lot out there who know him. He is a plumber guy. He goes live every single day. If a plumber can find interesting content to talk about and to put a mess out there live and every day because that's phenomenal. I couldn't even do it every day. I don't think. But you know, that means that there is a content piece there for every business. And what's beautiful about it is that you can do so much with it. As you said, you're going to turn around and repurpose this. You can use this in a blog if you wanted. You could use this in a podcast. So you can take one piece of content and make multiples out of it, and actually simplify your whole content strategy process.

Dorien:

That's right. So let's talk about tips. In the green room we were talking about, look at your beautiful background, right? You've got it all set up. You do a lot of live streaming. Of course, your workforce StreamYard. That makes sense. Right? I'm in an office in Vermont. And I actually told you that the reason I do this in the morning at 10:00 AM is that that gives me the best light. I'm in an office with two windows. It's winter right now by like 4:00, 4:30. If I'm in a meeting, the sun kind of goes down. It gets dark and my office. So I decided that I want natural light.

I also have nothing in the background right now. It's actually a wall, wanted to show you all. I'm actually with my back up against a wall. It's white. It gives me the best options. Now, if I wanted to push my desk forward and build something as you have behind you, that could work as well. But it could be very, really simple. If you are in a more general place or in a shared office, Julie, do you have any tips for live streaming when you either share an office or space or you are in an office that might be messy or you don't have a nice background. What are some options of what people can do?

Julie:

Yeah. So first of all, I want to tell people, don't let looking at a background like mine go, "Oh my gosh, I don't have that. Now. I can't go live." Because you don't have to. So you don't have to have fancy equipment and fancy lighting. You can work with what you have. For years I did work out of a shared office with my business partner when I had my agency, and we had our desks facing each other. So she worked facing me with a wall behind her. And I worked facing her with a wall behind me. And when we needed to go live, that was exactly what we did. Where we would just use the wall that was behind us. For a while, there was very little stuff behind us. We did angle things for a while because we had some beautiful windows, and we had some stuff designed there, but it took us time.

When I moved to my home office, I didn't have this set up initially. Again, I kind of stuck things in my office and worked with what I had. And over time I played with it a little bit and I adjusted a little bit. And I didn't go buy any of this for live streaming, other than the LED strip light. The blue light is the only thing I bought. And I think it was like $20 on Amazon guys. It wasn't expensive. Everything else was shelves I already owned books. I just put on the bookshelf and little knickknacks that I slowly just worked with. So you can start with the space you have. The thing I say is just mindful. So for a while, I was live streaming out of my dining room area. Because I didn't have my office set up.

It was a spare room and there wasn't space in there. But what I realized was in my dining room area, I had a sliding glass door in front of me, so I couldn't face, or on one side in my kitchen on the other. So if I tried to sit with the dining-room door behind me, then it created that silhouette effect. The lighting was really horrible. So if I turned to the other side though, I had the kitchen behind me. So I just had to remember that before I went live, I had to go clean my kitchen.

So just be mindful of little things. You don't have to go out of your way to do a ton, but also don't go live with a pile of dirty dishes behind you. If you can avoid it. Go bury them in the sink, at least, if you need to. So it's just taking that time before you go live, you turn the camera on and look at what your surrounding is and go, okay, is somebody going to sit there and nitpick a glass that was left behind me or some dirty dishes or the bed.

Dorien:

A wine bottle, a liquor bottle, right?

Julie:

Yeah.

Dorien:

So, that could happen. So, that's the visual. Does StreamYard have any virtual backgrounds?

Julie:

We do. So actually, I think I could go in and even adjust my own right now, and I could say, okay, I don't have a good background. I'm in a horrible place. I'm going to now make my background this fancy apartment. Now, when you use the virtual backgrounds, you do want to make sure your lighting is really good and you don't have... I would actually turn off all the other lights behind me and turn on my overhead light. I don't have that on. That would reduce these spots that keep showing up. And the other thing is if you have a higher back chair, you would want to use a lower back chair because that'll catch the edges of it. But the virtual background if you get into the right setting and into the right movement, it works really well.

Dorien:

That's awesome. So that's the view, the lighting, let's talk about audio. I notice that unlike me, you have a mic in front of you. I have earbuds. When you go live streaming and when you get started, do you need anything fancy? What do you need? What do you have? And let's talk a little bit about sound.

Julie:

So I did not start with the fancy microphone. I'm using the Shure MV7 now, and I love it. I didn't get this microphone until about a year ago. Prior to that, I was using a Blue Yeti, which is about $100. Prior to that guys, I was using a $15 Lavalier mic from Amazon. And, prior to that, I was probably using the apple earbuds. So you don't need all of the fancy equipment again, to get started. You start with what you have and you slowly can work your way up into what your budget allows or into what your needs are. For a long time, I needed just the little Lavalier mic because most of my live streams were actually on the go. And so carrying around a big microphone was not going to work on the go. I was going to have to be looking at my backpack, and it was going to end up broken.

Dorien:

So, you make a good point. Can you use StreamYard to live stream live from your phone?

Julie:

You can.

Dorien:

On the go.

Julie:

Yeah. You can take it mobile. We do recommend the desktop. It is your best option. But for years I had a live show out of a pub every Friday. It was a local brewery, and we live stream there every single Friday, and it was done on our phones. And we would just connect the Lavalier mic, pull it across the table. So we had at least a mic sitting in front of us. So the phone could be further back. And that was all we needed. I do recommend, especially if you're going to have guests on your show, that you do have headphones.

StreamYard has an option that will reduce, it's called echo cancellation. So if you did not have headphones in, it would reduce that echo feedback that your mic is picking up your guest audio. But it is ideal to have headphones. I get commented on all the time. People are like, but you don't have headphones in. And, I will say guys, again, I'm a sucker for a good budget and for good affordability. These are the MEE. Let me pull out the little... Oh, here it is. So, Mee. And they are just clear in-ear headphones that were $13 on Amazon. Again. I like affordability.

Dorien:

That's awesome. I might have to get myself a pair like that. That's awesome. That's really great. Yeah. And you can't tell that you wear them.

Julie:

No, unless I turn.

Dorien:

Yeah, you can't tell. All right. That's awesome. So we've talked a little bit about where you can go live stream. So how do you choose that? So say your audience is really great on LinkedIn and your focus is on LinkedIn. Should you still go try these live streams and make them go to a Facebook page or YouTube, Twitter? You mentioned Stitcher, you mentioned some different places. Should somebody do that? Should you say, well, let's just go live on LinkedIn and then see... What is the kind of standard practices for somebody when they get started?

Julie:

So I think there's a lot of ways you could go about this. I think one is, of course, to figure out where your audience is spending their time. If your audience is predominantly on LinkedIn, then that needs to be your number one place you're choosing. But if you have an audience on Facebook, put it on Facebook as well. Because you're going to catch people, especially the way Facebook notifications work and LinkedIn notifications, they're all different. And somebody may be on Facebook at that moment when they go live and they get that notification that, Hey, we're live, and they're going to go, oh, I forgot they were going live. I'm going to go watch that because they happen to be there the moment and get that notification.

And then building out these other platforms, starting to build your watch time, like on YouTube, starting to build that audience there it's just one more piece that you can add to building your content library in these places. So I do recommend doing them in multiple places. However, there are also some interesting strategies of saying, this is exclusive to my LinkedIn audience. If you really want to pull them over there and build that audience. But then you need to make sure you're spending the time to go promote in all of the other places so they have the reminder so they know to come there.

One other thing that you can do that is something with StreamYard is you can start out your Live everywhere and then say okay guys, now the rest of this content for the rest of this show is going to be exclusive to members of my group. So if you want to hear the rest of Julie's tips, you need to make sure you're a member of my group. So go join my group and we're going to end the Live everywhere else. So make sure you're jumping in the group to watch the rest. So then you can start to create that exclusive content because StreamYard will allow you to stop a stream on select locations while you're live. Yeah, you could up to the top.

Dorien:

I didn't know that.

Julie:

You can go up to the top to where you have your little icons for each of your places and you could click on each of those and end the stream in just those locations and then leave one running.

Dorien:

Oh wow. Lisa says... I think Lisa uses the StreamYard. She says great insight. I did not know that. I love that strategy. That was like wonderful tips. That is great.

Julie:

You create that teaser out there that gets everybody hooked into your stream. You provide that a little bit. And then you're like, okay, but now we're shutting it down for the rest of you. Sorry, you got to be over here.

Dorien:

That's lovely. And you could structure your show that way. You could structure it, so in five minutes, I'm going to introduce Julie. I'm going to tell her all the tips. What she's going to talk about? We'll have Julie give one tip and then we're going to end it. And everything else will be right there in the group. I love that. That is brilliant. So, Julie, that is great. I have some rapid-fire questions for you before I leave. I know that you have a lot more tips about live streaming guys. If you want to connect with Julie, this is Julie's LinkedIn. I grab that for her. So you guys can connect with Julie. If you want to know more about StreamYard, go to streamyard.com. Make sure that you check that out. Julie, is there a trial for StreamYard that people can try out?

Julie:

There is not. Well, we do, you have to reach out for it. But if you reach out to me directly, you can message me, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, any of the places. Message me if you want a free trial and I will get you set up with that.

Dorien:

Okay. That is fantastic. So, Julie, I've got three rapid-fire questions, and then we're going to wrap this up. This has been amazing... I just love all the tips you gave. And if you are watching this or listening to this on the podcast and you have been hesitant about getting started, it took me four, like I said, to do this for a client to get started on my show. I wasn't afraid of the camera, but there were a lot of other pieces that helped me back. Getting started is pretty easy. There are a lot more tips here. Come to our Facebook group where I can share more things. Here is the link to the Facebook group. It's called strategy talks community. But Julie, win the lottery or land your dream job?

Julie:

Land my dream job.

Dorien:

All right. Emails or conversations?

Julie:

Conversations.

Dorien:

Book smarts or street smarts?

Julie:

Street smarts.

Dorien:

All right. I love that. Julie. Thank you so much. I see you on social media all the time. You are the social media manager for StreamYard. You're going, we were to talk in the green room. You're going to be at Social Media Marketing World. So if any social media professionals are watching this, go check and find her at the booth for StreamYard and meet up with Julie, you, and I have met in person. And it's just lovely to make those connections.

And if you've been watching the show, this was episode number three or listening to it. So far, every single guest I've had. I have met in person, guys. Yes. I met them on social media and then furthered that relationship by meeting in real life. And there's just so something amazing about getting face to face with people. So, Julie, I'm going to let you go. I know you have several other shows and live places to be today. Thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you to those who are watching, jumped in real quick, wherever you were. And I'll be back next week with Tim Campbell Smith and you know, another guest. Tuesdays at 10:00. Thank you so much for being my guest, Julie, and I can't wait. I'll see you in March in San Diego.

My guest, Julie Riley, is a social media manager for StreamYard, and she loves everything about marketing. She has been working in digital marketing since 2007 while working at a Harley-Davidson dealer. Since then, she’s worked on many different projects, including owning a social media marketing agency. Her experience includes e-commerce, SEO, social media marketing, chatbots, live video production - the list goes on!

Julie has received awards from the American Marketing Association - Wichita Chapter in 2019 as Marketer of the Year, was nominated to the 2019 Women Who Lead Program by the Wichita Business Journal, and was nominated for small business of the year by Small Business Association.

You can connect with Julie on LinkedIn

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