- Today I'm gonna show you how to use
Instagram Live for business.
A lot of you have been asking about this,
so we'll first cover the basics of getting set up
and going on Instagram Live,
and then some ideas for how to use it
specifically for your business.
All right, let's get into it.
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My name is Jerry Potter,
and today we're talking about Instagram Live for business.
A few things to keep in mind with Instagram Live
versus some of the other live streaming platforms,
first of all, it is vertical video from your smart phone.
Unlike Facebook Live,
the video does not become a post in your feed or anywhere.
It automatically deletes after 24 hours.
Some people see that as an upside
because they feel like there's less pressure to perform
during Instagram Live.
But, of course, I'll show you
how to save your Live on your phone
so you can upload it at other places later if you want to.
And unlike of live streaming platforms,
there's no caption to get people interested or draw them in.
They just see that you are live.
They have to click on it
and hope that you're talking about something
that they're interested in.
Once you're in Instagram,
to do an Instagram Live,
you're gonna go to the same place you do in Instagram Story,
which would either be the camera icon on the upper left
or you can just swipe right
and enter your Instagram stories area here.
This is essentially the Instagram camera.
And of course swipe through the different options
for Instagram Stories or you can choose Live
and this is where you're gonna go live on Instagram.
As you can see it'll show you how many of your followers
are active in Instagram right now
which is a nice indication of whether or not
people might actually tune in and catch you live
if you haven't pre-promoted it ahead of time.
Couple tips before you go live.
Before you even come in here
make sure you have a strong signal.
WiFi or a strong cell signal
and then of course make sure if you can
you're attached to a microphone.
It could be as simple as the headset
that came with your phone,
but you'll get much better audio that way
especially if you're in a place
with any kind of ambient noise around.
Not a whole lot of settings before you start.
You can see on the lower right there
you can flip the camera to front-facing versus rear-facing.
This little smiley face at the top
is going to be lots of different filters
that you can choose if you want to play around
and have something a little more distinctive looking.
Either to help you be comfortable on camera
or to help your video be more entertaining
if somebody happens to tap on it
if you have a funny filter,
maybe they'll watch longer.
Then once you're ready tap Go Live.
Check your connection and you're live.
So let's take a quick tour of the screen
you're looking at while you're live.
First of all you can see
the comment box there at the bottom,
but that's where you can leave comments as well.
So if you are coordinated enough,
and I struggle with this,
you can type in a subject that you want to have there
and then you can actually pin the comment
by holding down on it
and then it will pop up here like this
and you say, hey I want to pin this comment to the top.
So that way if new people start commenting
that one will still stay at the top the whole time.
So if you're doing a Q&A like I was in this one,
you can pin your question to the top there
or your subject matter
and that way anyone who tunes in part way through
will know what you are doing.
If for some reason you didn't want comments,
maybe you're being really vulnerable
and you're worried that a comment will throw you off
or whatever it might be,
you can tap the three dots in the comment box
and turn those off.
The other things is your viewers
can actually go live with you if you want them to,
but if you don't want people to have that option
then you can also turn that off right there.
If you look at the top of the screen
you'll see this pink Live indicator
and if you tap that it'll actually show you
how long you've been live.
So if you've got kind of a time frame in mind
of how long you wanna be live
then that will kind of help you keep track
or you might go, oh my gosh,
I've been on for two and a half minutes
and I haven't even gotten into my point yet.
So that can be a good indicator
or you may prefer just to have it hidden.
You can switch from the front-facing
to the rear-facing camera
during an Instagram Live.
So if wanna do that you're gonna tap the arrows there
at the top on the left.
The little icon with the question mark at the bottom,
if users have submitted questions to you ahead of time
through your Instagram Story,
well then they appear there
and it's kinda neat,
you can tap on them
and then you will actually see them on the screen
as well your viewers.
So if you're doing a Q&A you can do it that way.
Down here at the bottom,
the paper airplane,
that is to share the live video
and so you can go ahead and tap that
and then send the live video to somebody.
Let's say you wanted to try and send them a notification
so then maybe they would come and watch
and you can invite them on Live
or you wanted to make sure that they were watching.
You could do it that way.
At the same time your viewers
have that same button available to them.
So it can be a good idea if you're providing value
or doing something entertaining,
where you can say to people,
hey, if there's somebody that you know
that this would be helpful for
or that would find this as funny as we do
or whatever the case might be,
go ahead and hit that little paper airplane
and share it with them so they can join us live today.
The little two smiley faces
next to the paper airplane at the bottom,
that is to invite somebody to be live with you.
So if you wanted to have a guest
and you didn't turn that feature off
the way we should you a few seconds ago,
this way you can invite somebody to be live with you.
It'll pull up the people that are already viewing
or from there you can DM somebody
that is not viewing live and see
if they'll actually come on.
Sometimes I'm watching a live
and they'll be talking about somebody or something
and they'll say, hey, let's get Jim's take on this
and then that way they can notify him
and bring him in during the live video.
It's actually pretty cool feature.
By the way if you invite somebody to join you live
they have to accept it.
So you don't have to worry about
like springing the camera on them
while they're sitting in their bathrobe
or something like that.
So they will have to accept it.
Next to the two smiley faces is your filters.
You can choose to do different filters if you want.
Like we showed before you go live.
Here you can add or change them as you go
and then next to that,
and my understanding is this is only available on iPhone,
which is what I'm using now,
but you can actually share photo's or video's
from your camera roll on your Instagram Live.
So theoretically you can actually make slides,
formatted for Instagram Live
and I might do this at some point
and actually do a tutorial on Instagram Live
showing slides from your camera roll.
Almost using it like a Google Slides
or a PowerPoint presentation.
And as you can see,
you are still picture in picture up in the corner,
so if you are designing slides
make sure to keep nothing important in that area,
'cause it will get covered up
and you're seeing my perspective
as the person doing the Instagram Live
where you can see my camera roll here at the bottom
but on the other side people can only see the pictures
or video's that you tap on and choose to share.
When you're done hit end right there at the top
and then it'll ask you to confirm
and then once you've confirmed
just stop take a deep breath.
Sometimes when any of us gets off an Instagram Live
if we got nervous which I still do sometimes,
we'll kind of panic and hit the Home button on our phone
and just get out of there like,
okay that was over
or now I gotta go to reply some DM's I got
or whatever it might be,
but that screen pops up after you end
and this is where you can choose
if you want to save it to your phone.
You can't go back and get it later.
So you can see that arrow there on the upper right.
You tap that it will save the video to your phone.
It will not save the comments
or any of the emoji reactions that you got.
It only saves the video,
but that way you can repurpose it to IGTV
or somewhere else if you want to.
If you wanted to save it with the comments
which I used for some of the clips in this tutorial,
well after it's over
you could use your screen recorder
built in to most smartphones these days
to record it as you played it back
or you can connect it to a computer
and some programs,
including QuickTime on Mac,
will let you record
what's on your iPhone screen for example,
on your computer and I'm sure there are
Android equivalents as well.
So assuming you didn't discard it
and decided to save it,
it will stick at the top of people's feeds
for the next 24 hours.
So it shows up with the Instagram Stories.
As you can see it has a slightly different icon there
with that play button on it.
Depending on how long your Instagram Live was
it might take a few minutes for it to show up.
So don't panic if you don't see it right away.
Of course if you don't want it to be up at all,
because it went terribly or whatever reason,
you can just discard it
and anybody who didn't catch it live
won't be seeing it at all.
Some ways you can use Instagram Live for your business,
well first of all,
video we always talk about
being the great trust accelerator.
Like a client or a customer you've never met
can trust you and be willing to hire you
or buy from you even though they don't know you,
because they see you on video.
Well if video is the race car trust accelerator,
live video is like a fighter jet.
So get over the fear and dive in there
and start doing live video.
Show anything that's going on in your business.
One of the simplest things that businesses do
is just opening the mail sometimes,
a package,
because there's like an outcome,
like I wanna see what's in this box.
So people will keep watching.
Use Instagram Live to interview clients
or customers or experts
as we showed you earlier in the video.
You can do contests on Instagram Live,
you can show behind the scenes.
A lot of different things you can do
and not have to worry too much about it,
'cause it's just gonna be gone in 24 hours anyway.
So show anything and everything.
People love to see that stuff.
Two more quick things.
One, use the Instagram Countdown sticker
as a way to build anticipation for your live video's
and I've got a video on how to use that
in the description of this video.
And then the other thing is,
if you're still stuck on content ideas,
I've got this free resource I'm happy to give you.
24 proven content ideas for small businesses.
You wanna get it?
Grab it in the description of this video as well.
If you use Instagram Live
I'd love to know what you're using it for.
Let me know in the comments
along with any other questions you may have
about what we covered today.
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Five Minute Social Media.
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