Streaming Media East '15: Twitter Offers Periscope Best Practices
"We've made it super-easy for anybody to be a content creator," said Mike Park, director of content partnerships at Twitter Amplify, giving the opening day keynote address at Streaming Media East 2015 in New York City.
Twitter has done far more to engage users with video than simply adding video to tweets, Park explained. Over the last few years, Twitter has acquired Vine, created Amplify to work with brands, debuted video cards, acquired SnappyTV to let businesses create clips from live streams, offered pay-per-view video ads called promoted videos, included a mobile video camera within its apps, and purchased Niche as a dashboard for creating branded content. Most recently, of course, it acquired Periscope for live video streaming.
"Users don't care how all these things come together," Park noted. What they care about is that they work and that they're easy to access.
Periscope is new but took off quickly, and Park said that viewers giving hearts to show approval has become a new currency. While cautioning that Twitter doesn't want to be prescriptive about the new platform, he offered some simple best practices for getting positive live results.
- Have a plan ahead of time. "Have a rough idea what you're going to shoot."
- Narrate the video to engage the viewers.
- Be mindful of the live stream's length. Between one and three minutes is the sweet spot, Park said.
- Offer a recap of the action as new viewers join the stream.
- Make sure there's strong Wi-Fi connectivity before streaming.
- Pre-promote a stream to ensure an audience.
"Finally, big moments can be captured like never before," Park said. Periscope is the perfect match of democratic access and live content, he added.
Offering up Twitter stats, Park said that 90 percent of Twitter users are on mobile devices, and 73 percent watch live TV while sending or viewing tweets. He showed how big events reverberate across the platform: 497,000 Twitter users tweeted during the Empire finale, sending 2.4 million tweets which were viewed by 112.1 million people.
Park broke some news during his keynote, announcing the Auto Amplify service. With Auto Amplify, brands can get their sponsorship pre-rolls on timely videos. Speed matters, he noted, and brands need to join conversations immediately to get re-tweet value. The ideal time is during the first five minutes after an event happens. As an example, he showed how the NBA used SnappyTV to create an instant highlight clip during a game, and a sporting goods chain used Auto Amplify to sponsor that tweeted video.
Over 150 premium publishers currently use Amplify, Park said, with half outside the U.S. The platform has seen a surge in non-sports content.
Periscope got some negative press last week when many users broadcast and watched live streams of the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight through the platform. Responding to an audience question, Park said that Twitter doesn't condone such activity, takes down copyrighted streams right away, and wants to work with partners to create best process for removing infringing content.
Mike Park of Twitter Amplify
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