Last week, Instagram rolled out another great feature: Go Live With A Friend. This new option enables you to broadcast in collaboration with someone else, which opens up a whole new world for Instagram Live videos.
In this post, I’ll give you five ideas on how you can use Instagram’s Live with a friend option for you brand or business.
How To Use Instagram’s Go Live With A Friend
Going Live with a friend is simple. First, you open the camera on the upper left hand side of your Instagram home screen and select the Live option, as you normally would. Tap the two happy faces icon on the bottom right and tap “Add” to invite anyone who’s currently watching your Live Story. Once they join, the screen is split into two, and your guest will pop up right below you on the video feed.
You can swap one guest with another at any time during your broadcast, or they can see themselves out on their own. Like with any other Live Story you can share your Live with a friend video to your Story when your broadcast has ended, or you can choose to discard it and have it only exist in the moment.
Benefits to Going Live With A Friend
First off, we know that videos, and live videos in particular, are generating the most reach across all social media networks. Using Stories and Live Stories is also a great way to connect with your audience beyond your feed, while it’s also an opportunity to show your brand personality.
I’ve also found that my clients who use Live Stories are seeing more audience growth and retention on Instagram than those that don’t.
You’re also able to save your Instagram Live videos for re-purposing on other networks, or hosting it on a page that anyone who missed it can replay.
But the best part about Live with a friend Stories is that they can expose your business to a new audience. This is because when someone goes live with a friend, you’ll see two circles stacked together in your stories bar – yours and your guests, which means that both your connections and theirs will see it.
Last, but not least, if you’re shy, teaming up with someone for a live story might provide an easier way into the live video creatio process.
Here are five ideas for Live with a friend broadcasts for business:
1. Interviews/Q & A
Instagram’s co-streaming feature is going to be great for conducting interviews with someone else, or for conducting question and answer sessions with fan and/or other influencers within your industry and your audience.
2. Collaboration/Joint “Webinars” Or Takeovers
A popular way for businesses’ to grow their audiences on social media is to conduct webinars or to collaborate with other industry experts to create content.
Instagram co-streaming can bring the webinar experience to the live space – you’ll now be able to work with others to conduct live sessions based around a specific topic, which can add a lot of value to your audience.
3. Collaboration Announcements
Speaking of collaborating, with Instagram’s ‘Live with a Friend’ option, how fun would it be to announce a big collaboration between yourself and another brand live?
You can grab your partner to announce your collaboration, and build buzz for the live broadcast.
4. Round-Ups
One of the most popular content types out there is the round-up – they help businesses connect with influencers and can help participants reach new audiences (when those mentioned in the round-up share the specific post).
Round-ups can also add a lot of value to readers, because you can get a lot of information from different sources in one post. Since you can swap guests on Live with a friend Stories, it can be a really fun way to create a round-up style summary that your audience will enjoy.
5. Contests
Contests are another fantastic way to see quick growth on social media, and Instagram’s collaborative live-streaming option could offer a lot of fun contest opportunities.
Imagine a game show format contest, where you can have your followers participate in your broadcast and answer questions for a prize.
This type of initiative can be a really great way to add personality to your account – and could be particularly popular, especially when you consider the recent rise of social trivia app HQ.
There’s a range of ways in which the new option could be used – another option could be walk-throughs of your business, where the guest user shows the audience around, while the main account narrates the vision.
Hopefully, this post has helped you drum up some ideas about how your business can use Instagram’s live stream guest feature. Which one of these ideas are you most likely to try?
A version of this post was first published on Dhariana Lozano’s blog.