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Summary:

  • By live streaming to your guests' social media channels, you can reach a new audience, increase engagement, and provide value to your guests.
  • To optimize results, make sure your content is aligned with their audience's needs.
  • The easiest way to do this is with guest destinations — a StreamYard feature.

The easiest way to grow your live stream audience is streaming to other people's social media channels. At StreamYard, we have a feature that makes this easy: Guest Destinations. It lets your guests add their own social media destinations to the broadcast.

You gain exposure to your guests' audience, and they get more views on their social media channels. We’ll show you how it works in a minute.

But first, why would you want to do this? And how do you ensure that it actually grows your audience?

Let's start with the 3 main reasons why.

1. Reach a NEW Audience

With over 4.26 billion people using social media globally, every content creator and marketer aims to tap into this vast market. Live streaming is one of the best ways to boost social media engagement and reach a wider audience.

You can grow your audience even more by live streaming from your channels and your friends' as well.

Let’s take an example:

  • Andrew Kan is a creator who talks about YouTube growth with ~12K subscribers.
  • Daniel Batal has a similar channel, except with a different style and ~250K subscribers.

If Andrew were to invite Daniel to a broadcast and have Daniel add his YouTube channel as a guest destination, he’d be exposed to a whole audience that may be interested in his content!

And Andrew wouldn’t be limited to just Daniel’s channel.

We currently support adding up to 6 total guest destinations across 6 guests. That means you could have 3 guests with 2 destinations each, 6 guests with 1 destination each, or any combination in between.

And they can stream to every social platform that StreamYard integrates with, including Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

2. Boost Engagement

Streaming to your guests' social media channels will increase your engagement, because you’ll have more viewers tuning in.

And more viewers means:

  • More comments, questions, and feedback. This helps you to understand what your audience is interested in and what they want to see more of. It also improves the experience of other viewers by making the stream feel ALIVE. These conversations are where relationship-building happens.
  • More likes, which can help your content to gain more visibility on social media and signal to social algorithms that your content is valuable, which can help to further increase its reach.
  • More subscribers. If your guests’ community resonates with your content, they may want to follow you to see more of your content in the future.

And the type of engagement you’ll get here is different from what you’d get by guest posting on your friend’s blog or just asking them to share your content.

In fact, a survey conducted by LiveStream suggests that 82% of audiences would rather watch live videos than any other social media posts from a brand.

3. Provide Value to Your Guests

Live streaming to your guests' social media channels doesn't only benefit you as the host. It also provides value to your guests.

As a host, you'll sometimes have a smaller audience than your guests. So, you'll gain a wider audience by live streaming to the guests' social media channels. But the guests will also benefit from your content, especially if it is valuable, authoritative, and credible.

And that content is free of charge for them since guests don't require a paid plan to use Guest Destinations. Instead, they only need to create an account on StreamYard to log in. And the live streams will also get them more views and engagement on their channel.

Since interacting with your guest's audience during the live broadcasts allows them to sample your content, their feedback can also boost the guests' credibility. For instance, if the new audience loves and resonates with your live show, they'll thank your guest for introducing them to you. And they're more likely to maintain their trust and loyalty to the guest's brand.

The Key to Successful Collaborations: Prioritizing Content-Audience Fit

If we’ve convinced you that you should stream to your guests’ social media channels, here's the #1 thing you need to know before deciding whose channels you want to stream to and what to talk about during the stream to ensure that it actually helps you grow: content-audience fit.

Content-audience fit means ensuring your content aligns with your guest's audience's goals.

Going back to our earlier example, Andrew Kan and Daniel Batal both have audiences who want to grow their YouTube channels. So if Andrew were to host Daniel as a guest and stream to his channel, he is likely to reach people who care about what he has to say.

Also, Andrew would know exactly what to talk about — YouTube growth — because that’s precisely what Daniel’s community cares about. This will not only help him reach a wider audience but also increase engagement and grow his own following as well.

How It Works

Here’s a step-by-step video walkthrough to show you how you can stream to your guest’s channels by using StreamYard’s Guest Destinations feature.

Start Leveraging Guest Destinations Today

To summarize, you should live stream to your guests' social media platforms because you'll:

  • Reach a new audience
  • Boost audience engagement
  • Provide value to your guests

And it works even better if your content fits your guests’ community as you decide who to invite and what to talk about — that’s the secret ingredient in successful live stream collaborations.

If you’re ready to give Guest Destinations a shot, get started today.

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