Live Streaming Mobile Platform Opens New Doors for Socializing Events and Education

Instead of sharing brief glimpses of the recent past through SnapChat, Vine or Tumbler, why not take your video live with Periscope or Meerkat? These two mobile streaming platforms provide up-to-the-second video clips of your life as it happens through an app on your Smart Phone.

After you install Periscope or Meerkat, you can link the app to your Twitter account and start streaming a live feed, regardless of where you are located. Viewers can watch you via their mobile device, a computer or the app’s website.

Testing, Testing – 1, 2, 3

Will anyone watch your feed? Maybe, maybe not.

It depends largely on what you’re recording, how you promote it, and if anyone is online who is drawn to the topic. This is where hashtag sophistication and a robust Twitter following come in handy – and deliver some ROI.  I recently tested out Meerkat – Periscope had not yet launched its Android version, but it’s available now.  A newbie to the platform, I gave it a go more out of inspiration rather than a planned attack. 

I was attending an educational seminar and decided to test the live streaming.  Granted, I made a couple of slip-ups, such as leaving out a customized tweet (I created it, but it didn’t post due to an error on my part.)  That said, within 10 minutes about 30 followers checked out the stream and five sat through the entire presentation.  Since I didn’t promote the event, save for the auto-post generated by Meerkat, and didn’t even include a descriptive hashtag, I was impressed with the outcome.

Periscope vs. Meerkat

While both Meerkat and Periscope are live streaming platforms, there are some differences between the two. Twitter recently bought Periscope for a reported $100 million. One might conclude that Twitter is unlikely to make it easy for Meerkat to compete with its own live streaming platform.  As an example, Periscope users can automatically connect to their Twitter followers, but Meerkatters do not enjoy that convenient connectivity feature.

Another difference between Periscope and Meerkat is that Periscope users can save and replay their streams for their audience while the streams created with Meerkat disappear from the link after the stream has ended. This replay feature can be useful for business owners whose audiences aren’t available at that exact moment during the day.

That said, as of this post, there is one key area where Meerkat  continues to trump Periscope and that is the ability to schedule a Live Streaming Event.  Meerkat enables you to set up your event and generate a link so you can promote it in advance to build an audience leading up to the day.  Periscope needs to get on this.

Next One point of distinction and Is Mobile Live Streaming for You?