Hey, how’s it going everybody?
This is your efficient and effective YouTube expert, Derral Eves!
Now today we’re going to cover a lot of great stuff, one of the things is we’re
going to actually talk about live events on YouTube.
I actually held my first live event and I decided to tap the shoulder of a good friend
of mine, Gideon Shalwick from Australia to come visit us.
And we’re actually going to take some time and discuss all the cool things that you need
to be doing right now on your YouTube channel.
Let’s take a look!
DERRAL: Hey, welcome back!
I have my friend and fellow YouTube certified expert, Gideon Shalwick.
Gideon, how are you doing?
GIDEON: Good, thanks for having me, Derral!
DERRAL: I’m grateful that you’re able to come all the way from Australia to sit
down with me, so we can actually discuss YouTube live.
GIDEON: Absolutely, I’m really looking forward to it.
There’s really amazing things happening with it.
DERRAL: So, why is it important that people should consider this as a viable option to
really grow their channel?
What’s the main reason?
What’s the most important reason why someone should actually use YouTube live as part of
their strategy to grow their channel, and to get more video views, but ultimately really
build an audience?
GIDEON: I think there’s a ton of benefits with YouTube live, I think nowadays it’s
become too difficult to create engaging videos compared to everything else that’s happening
on YouTube has been increasing a lot.
That’s one of the things.
So with a live event it’s so much easier to create something that’s really engaging
that captures and gets them to stay on YouTube, watching your video.
And as you know, you know, YouTube talks about this as well that for looking at ranking of
videos or looking at the importance of videos it’s really important to try to look at
the watch time of the video and also the session time of the person watching the video on YouTube.
So with YouTube live events that becomes kind of like a secret weapon almost to help increase
those factors that YouTube looks at for helping to rank your video.
DERRAL: You know, and people talk about, you know, watch time and making sure you have
as much watch time as possible.
And I actually sat through one of your live events and it was like two hours long and
I was like you had my attention the whole time, it was very engaging.
And I noticed that you were able to do that because you might have done a lot of webinars
or something where you’re using go2webinar or hangouts or something because you actually
had your flow down and it worked out really well.
So what would you suggest for someone that’s getting into this.
If they’re doing webinars because I think go2webinar is like $500 or something like
that a month?
It’s crazy!
GIDEON: There are a few crazy options around and I guess that’s the other thing that’s
really great about YouTube live is the quality that you can get is just incredible.
DERRAL: So a lot of the questions that a lot of people have is you know what?
I do hangouts, what’s the difference between that and a hangout?
Or I use go2webinar and I do webinars, what’s the difference?
Why should they do this option as a YouTube live event vs a hangout on air or using go2webinar?
GIDEON: A number of things, I think in general the outcome is that you have a more engaging
and more professional production at the end of it with YouTube live, at the moment at
least compared to hangouts, the quality is just a ton better, that’s one thing.
Now is that really a good enough reason to go YouTube live and…
DERRAL: It was for me because I hate that little icon that’s up there and then you’re
going…
hi…
my name’s Derral.
And it’s like out of sync and it just drove me nuts!
GIDEON: The out of sync thing is really a problem and I’m guessing Google with hangouts
eventually and also they will probably fix the quality as well.
But at the moment the quality is just so much better with YouTube live.
The other thing that I really love about it is the control that you can have compared
to hangouts.
For example I can bring in any kind of video clip into my stream.
I can just cue it in and that makes it even more engaging and it gives me more flexibility
to make the whole production more professional and get people to keep on watching and I can’t
do that with google hangouts at the moment.
And other things like just switching between screens I find it terribly difficult to do
in hangouts.
DERRAL: It is an issue, one I found too.
And what I love about live events is that the experience is a lot different.
There is one other thing that is a huge issue, and I found this out in my first live event
that I had on my channel, is that I actually set a lag because I wanted to make sure I
was streaming it at 1080.
I had a lag of 30 seconds, but then I also had another minute on the other side so that
was a minute and a half of people responding to me and it just didn’t work out very well
for questions and answers, but I learned that hey I can bring that back down so it’s zero
and I can actually interact with them.
But you were actually just on a live event that I was on and you were using some different
tools for different things, what would you recommend for some tools that people can use
for their live event?
GIDEON: With any kind of video that you do the more movement that you can have on the
screen the better.
The more engaging just by the nature of it your production will be.
Because you know as human beings we are trained to look for movement, you know we are always
catching movement and the scenery in front of us.
So whatever you can do to change the scenery for people on your video, that’s a plus.
So that will include things like and extra camera shot perhaps that you can switch between,
maybe having some slides changing between what people see on the camera and what they
can see on your screen, that’s very useful as well.
And something that I often bring in as well is a little bamboo pad that I can draw on
and so I draw pictures on the screen, so very engaging people watching me draw.
You know, it’s one of those things that you can do live that I’m sure you can do
it on a pre-recorded and pre-edited video as well, but when it’s done live the key
thing is that people are sitting there, if they’re watching it live, and they’re
anticipating what’s coming up next.
They’re sitting there with you creating the future, whereas with a pre-recorded thing
it’s already done, it’s kind of old news already, whereas when it’s live there’s
the whole anticipation thing of not knowing what’s going to happen next.
DERRAL: And if you’re if you’re going to miss out, if you’re going to miss out
on something.
The anticipation and knowing what’s going to be next and you don’t know what’s next
and you don’t want to miss out and people will literally sit down and watch you for
the amount of time.
I mean, I watched him for two hours, I don’t know why.
GIDEON: Yeah, it is a bit like that.
It’s like starting to watch a really terrible and really boring movie and just because you’ve
started watching it you somehow feel like you have to finish watching it.
Even if it’s a really bad movie.
DERRAL: And you come back for more.
And you come back for more all the time!
Oh!
I’ve got to go get more, he has another live event!
You know all this other stuff, but…
GIDEON: Of course if you can make it not boring and very exciting that’s even better.
But I think that’s just the nature of the medium.
Because it’s live people are just naturally more in tune to sitting there and watching.
I mean, the one that I just ran recently people, like yourself, would watch the whole thing!
You know, there was like hundreds of people on there watching, sitting there for more
than an hour, watching a video.
And, you know, when can you get that with a pre-recorded, even a 5 min video in most
cases are long.
DERRAL: And I think that the powerful thing behind this, and I want everyone to understand
that is watching this video up to the point is you can literally engage with your audience
live by calling their name out, responding where they’re calling in from, if they’re
in whatever part of the world.
And they feel a part of this community, and I think that right there, I think honestly
that is a really powerful aspect of YouTube live and doing live events.
Is to really bring your community closer together so they feel a part of something.
GIDEON: Yeah, that’s massive community and community building with live events is huge
and there’s many ways of doing it.
If you want to go for the strongest kind of community building you just run the live event
on the YouTube and encourage people to leave comments on the YouTube comments.
I’ve also been experimenting a bit with running the live events on a different website,
on my own website, that’s another cool thing, but I’m not sure you can do it with something
like go2webinar.
You can grab the embed code from a YouTube live event, throw it on a website and run
the live event from your website, use your own commenting if you want to, you know, if
you’d like.
If it’s a sale presentation or something like that, where you have a bit more control
over what happens.
In terms of community building, yeah, doing it on YouTube, putting those comments there,
I haven’t seen anything better.
DERRAL: Yeah, and honestly too, you can use a great tool that YouTube has built right
in.
It is dealing with your fans, you can have a little thing called top fans and it works
integrated with Google+ you can actually just release a live video for your top most engaged
fans.
And that’s super powerful and they feel a little honored, I mean they become their
super fans and they’re really excited that it’s only content for them.
And the great thing about it is it really improves the community, which will get them
reaching out more with others.
So, thanks everybody for coming on and if you have any ideas of how to do a great live
event put it in the comments below, we want to have a kind of discussion.
Go ahead and check out Gideon’s channel, I put the link in the description below, he’s
very brilliant and does a good job on his presentation.
And he’s one to follow definitely.
Ok, now before you go, Gideon I have to confess a little issue I have, my wife really likes
the accent, and I don’t have an accent.
You’ve lived all over the world, you’ve lived in South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.
Maybe you can help me impress my wife a little bit by telling her to subscribe?
GIDEON: Yeah sure, just use the words, click here…
DERRAL: Click here!
David Walsh: And subscribe!!!