Over the past two years, popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, have quickly begun to add live stream video features to them. So which one is best? Which should you use? The answer is pretty straightforward: you should use the platform where your organic following is the largest. After all, live streaming is all about the response you get because otherwise you’d be talking to yourself and the purpose of going live would be defeated, wouldn’t you agree?
For these platforms to push their live streaming features ahead of all the others, they have to think of how they can get their users the maximum amount of viewers possible. Instagram seems like the only social media platform that has focused on this key piece of information. Anyone with their Instagram notifications turned on knows it really pushes its users to watch live streams. But now Instagram is going even further to expand the amount of live stream viewers.
Yesterday, Instagram released an update that allowed certain users the ability to go live with another user. Double the users, double the fun, double the viewers. While this feature is only available to a random group of users for testing, hopefully we will all be able to do it in the coming months.
Shilpa Sarkar, from the Instagram Live team, said that “after we launched the first version of Live [last November], we noticed that a lot of folks were using it with friends in person. We wanted to bring that offline behavior online, so to speak, with a feature that allows you to be live with a friend even if you aren’t in the exact same space.”
Creating this feature is not as easy as it seems. This means that the Live team had to make sure that the live streams were so up-to-date because nobody wants to wait ten seconds between every sentence in a conversation between the two live users.
This feature will allow Instagram to get ahead of other platforms in other ways as well. Now people may feel more comfortable going live because they aren’t alone. It’ll also allow brands and influencers to communicate with their following directly.