For brands, that signals a novel opportunity to bring the engagement power of live video to an untapped audience of more than 600 million enterprises and professionals.
We provided an overview of live video on LinkedIn in our LinkedIn Live Primer. In another piece, we dive into the demand-gen potential of each LinkedIn Live. In this article, we explore how to get started using LinkedIn Live.
In particular, we discuss why you need a third-party platform like Socialive for LinkedIn Live — and how Socialive enables you to create pro-level broadcasts.
First thing’s first: You can’t go live on LinkedIn natively
This is an important point about broadcasting live video on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn provides only the platform to play and engage with live video — not the ability to record or deliver live video to the platform.
In other words, you won’t be able to create a livestream using LinkedIn.com or the LinkedIn mobile app. Instead, to go live on LinkedIn, you’ll need what’s called an encoder — a third-party video app. (This is a key distinction between LinkedIn Live and livestreaming on social platforms like Facebook or Twitter.)
And that’s why LinkedIn is partnering with Socialive, an enterprise video content creation platform that enables organizations to create, broadcast, and distribute pro-level live and on-demand broadcasts for digital channels.
With Socialive, you can easily record and edit your video, as well as seamlessly deliver it live to LinkedIn — part of the live video workflow that LinkedIn doesn’t cover.
Polished broadcasts over raw livestreams
Why not send a raw, unfiltered livestream to LinkedIn? Why the need to create a broadcast-style livestream?
A key reason involves the distinct, professional nature of the LinkedIn community versus more consumer-centric social platforms.
Given the ethos of LinkedIn, one of the aims of LinkedIn Live is to elevate raw livestreams to the level of more polished broadcasts in terms of content quality and aesthetics.
Partnering with Socialive is a way for LinkedIn to encourage content that is easy to produce while meeting a higher quality threshold regarding content and production value.
In short, your audience expects professional, studio-quality content. Socialive makes it easy to create and deliver it.
Enterprise video platform Socialive is a LinkedIn Live partner
To reiterate, you need a third-party encoder to broadcast live video on LinkedIn.
Where LinkedIn provides the platform for viewers to watch and engage with a live broadcast, Socialive allows you to easily create the broadcast and deliver it live to the LinkedIn platform.
Socialive is an enterprise video platform that allows organizations to:
- Record video using any camera
- Build a broadcast using multiple live cameras and images
- Distribute a broadcast live across multiple channels — LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and more – all at the same time
Crucially, you can create a polished broadcast using your existing resources (i.e., your current team and equipment).
Socialive lets you easily create polished broadcasts for LinkedIn Live
Where a typical livestream entails a raw video stream from a single camera, the Socialive platform helps you create something closer to a professional broadcast.
Here’s what that means:
Multi-scene live broadcasts
Instead of an uninterrupted camera stream, Socialive allows you to switch between multiple live cameras and images.
Practically, that means you can create broadcasts with:
- Intro & outro cards (e.g., with calls to action)
- Live footage from different locations (e.g., a live broadcast from a bartending competition that shows hosts, guests, and participants in different places)
Branded on-screen graphics
Graphics enhance the production value of a live video, while also unlocking opportunities to spur engagement through strategic, in-broadcast calls to action.
With the Socialive platform, you can apply custom graphics to your broadcast with a single click, including:
- Title cards
- Headlines
- Lower-third nameplates
- Promo banners
- Logo watermarks
Split-screen and picture-in-picture layouts
With split-screen layouts, you can show more than one source onscreen at a time, facilitating broadcasts with subjects in different locations or scenes created at different times.
In Socialive, you can click to select or switch between a menu of split-screen options, allowing you to create a range of dynamic broadcasts, such as:
- Interviews and conversations with remote guests
- Live product demonstrations
- Tutorials
Screenshares
Relatedly, the Socialive platform also allows you to easily share your screen, so you can walk through a slide presentation, showcase a concept, and more.
Plus, efficiently record and seamlessly share video with Socialive
The Socialive platform spans the entirety of your live video workflow — from capturing video to delivering broadcasts to the LinkedIn platform.
Record video using any camera
Socialive allows you to capture video using your current equipment, from a smartphone or webcam to a high-end multi-cam setup.
This gives you the flexibility to quickly stream HD video from the field, or to record studio-style live broadcasts — and everything in between.
Video feeds from your cameras pop up in Socialive, and you can use them to build a live broadcast or to record footage to create your video later.
Deliver directly to LinkedIn
Socialive integrates with LinkedIn, so you can deliver your video to LinkedIn straight from Socialive.
With live video, you produce and distribute your broadcast concurrently. Using Socialive, you build your broadcast (the order of your show), and set up distribution to LinkedIn.
When you go live, you produce your show live — switching from pre-organized scene to scene — and your broadcast plays on LinkedIn in real-time.
Simulcast video across multiple channels
Instead of broadcasting your video on a single channel, the Socialive platform lets you distribute your video across all your channels at the same time.
In addition to LinkedIn, you can deliver your video live or on-demand to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, and your own websites and apps.
Simply select your channels in Socialive, start your broadcast to go live across multiple platforms, and expand the reach of your video content.
In order to broadcast live video on LinkedIn – and take advantage of the opportunity LinkedIn Live presents – you must use a third-party encoder.
While LinkedIn provides the platform where audiences can watch and engage with a live video, Socialive enables brands to capture video, produce a broadcast, and deliver it live to LinkedIn. After the show is over, Socialive also provides an easy way to repurpose that livestream into more revenue-generating content.
The LinkedIn-Socialive partnership is conceived to empower organizations to create the sort of polished live video that will resonate among LinkedIn’s community of enterprises and professionals — and to do so efficiently.
