What is Multistreaming?

Have you ever wished that you could be in multiple places at once? Multistreaming grants that wish (at least for live streams). Multistreaming means going live to multiple platforms, like Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, simultaneously. It offers serious benefits like

• Increased Reach. When you go live to another platform, you’re exposing a whole new audience to your content. And, if done effectively, it can essentially multiply your viewership.

• Insights about your audience. Multistreaming makes it easy to compare how your content is performing on different platforms and test out new ones. Maybe your content is performing much better on Facebook and LinkedIn than Youtube and Twitch – multistreaming provides these insights. You may want to cut out the low performers and focus on platforms where your content is doing well.

• Time Savings. With multistreaming, you can avoid downloading and reuploading your content to other platforms. Repurposing your content for other platforms can still be beneficial, but you can work much more efficiently by selecting a few platforms for multistreaming and repurposing on others.

Should you multistream?

In most cases, absolutely, but like everything else you should have a plan and purpose. We have found that multistreaming is particularly valuable for

• podcasters
• digital marketers
• entrepreneurs
• business owners
• and anyone else with a personal brand

If your brand closely is tied to the platform you stream to, i.e, you consider yourself a YouTuber or a Twitch Streamer, you might want to consider the pros and cons of multistreaming more carefully. If you are a YouTuber, your content is your product and you probably shouldn’t distribute it everywhere. Instead, you should consider using other social networks to drive people to your product (YouTube content) using repurposing and other forms of social media marketing.

However, if you fall into one of those other categories, multistreaming can be an amazing way to increase your reach and grow multiple communities simultaneously - again, if it is done correctly. Before you start multistreaming to another platform you should

• First stream to a single platform. Don’t jump straight into multistreaming. Take some time to get comfortable broadcasting to a single destination. When you add more destinations into the mix, you have multiple audiences to manage. This is not a problem once you are comfortable with broadcasting, but it can be overwhelming if you are a new streamer.
• Be familiar with every platform you broadcast to and use each one regularly. Do you know what Periscope is? If not, don’t stream to it. Mindlessly streaming to another platform is lazy, unprofessional, and a waste of time. You should be familiar with every platform that you multistream to and be active on them outside of your broadcasts.
• Know your audience. Think carefully about your audience and what social channels your business/brand already performs well on. If your audience doesn’t spend any time on the platform, it’s probably not somewhere you should be multistreaming.

Ready to start? You can learn how to multistream with StreamYard here.