Twitter connects people all around the world. The social media platform serves as one for people to share their thoughts and opinions. Celebrities, politicians and businesses are directly connected to their audience, supporters, and consumers. Launched in 2006, Twitter has more than half a million tweets sent daily. Twitter’s popularity stems from its unique functioning. It is undoubtedly different from most conventional famous existing social media platforms, especially in its use. Fortunately, the platform is incredibly easy to use for various reasons such as marketing, advertisements, PR, etc. You can grow your audience and create a consumer base by growing a following. There are multiple options on Twitter available to achieve this — one such option is going live.

What is Twitter Live?

Twitter Live is a feature of the social media platform that allows you to interact with your followers live. What makes going live so cool is that you can interact with your audience more personally than simply tweeting at them. You can interact with people live and hang with your Twitter audience in real time.

Should you go live?

Going live is advantageous in numerous ways. 

  • It is cost efficient
  • You can do it from alomst any location — as long as you have a good internet connection
  • All you need is your phone
  • You can expose your business, brand, products or service demos to your audience or consumers
  • You can engage with your audience or consumers directly without any third-party influence
  • You can repurpose content

However, there are some drawbacks. For instance, you might have are harassment concern, but a lot of that can be tackled by reporting or blocking.

So, how do you go live on Twitter?

  1. Launch the app 
  2. Tap the camera icon
  3. Click Live at the bottom
  4. Tap the microphone in the top corner to do an audio-only broadcast
  5. Write a description of your live video, which will appear as a tweet Add a location if you want your viewers to know where you’re streaming from
  6. Tap Go live. Your live video will now pop up in your followers’ timelines and on your profile as a tweet

To stream audio alone, disabling the camera’s video display, tap the microphone icon prior to tapping Go live. To end a live video, you can click the Stop button on the top left corner and confirming that you want to end the video in a pop-up menu.

Replay or share?

Twitter allows you to share a live broadcast or replay full screen mode. The steps are simple:

Option 1: Click Share from beginning if in replay mode or Share live when live to either tweet, DM or copy the link of the live video or replay it from the beginning.

Option 2: Click Share from to tweet, DM or copy the link of the live video. You can also click Share to replay, starting at a point chosen using the selection bar.

Block or report someone during a livestream?

There are numerous advantages of livestreaming on social media platforms, but there always is a concern of privacy and harassment. In such cases, you can block or report anyone doing so. To block someone:

  1. Tap on their comment
  2. Select the person’s profile
  3. Tap the gear icon
  4. Select Block user

To report an offensive or abusive comment, you can choose the Report comment option. 

Save and delete live videos

Your live videos are posted as a tweet automatically once you go live. Incase you would like to save your live video to your device, you could do that by clicking on the Save to camera roll option. You can delete any of your videos posted at any time by deleting your tweet. 

Edit live videos

To edit your broadcast, select the Edit broadcast option and save any changes you make. Each broadcast can be edited up to three times and the editing is limited to changing the title of the video, the thumbnail image and the starting point after the broadcast has ended.

Going live from a third-party source

  1. Go to your application settings and choose Custom streaming server
  2. Select Twitter from your pull-down option to authenticate the encoder with your account
  3. Log in to your Twitter account and accept permissions
  4. Start streaming

Time to go live

There is significant research content that supports the notion that livestreaming is the most preferred by consumers. It states that about more than half of the consumers would rather watch a live video than read an article or a blog post. The predicted stat for livestreaming market is $185 billion in the next ten years. So, there’s no better time to go live than now.