Grow your business using Periscope

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Jan 8, 2016 / by
Grow your business using Periscope

In the words of legendary Internet marketer and author Seth Godin, we’re living in a “connection economy” where the businesses that step up and create human connections with their customers are heavily rewarded.


Godin describes the internet as a “connection machine”, and out all of the applications released in recent years, few are as effective at facilitating connections between businesses and their audiences as Periscope.

Owned by Twitter, Periscope is a live streaming application which is currently soaring in popularity. While Periscope is used prolifically for recreational purposes, it can also benefit businesses in numerous ways.

1 – Showcase new products

It’s easy to see how video content is more powerful than static pictures and text when it comes to marketing a product, but Periscope takes this to the next level. Unlike a glossy sales video, Periscope allows you to showcase your product live in front of an audience who can send you questions in real-time. This is extremely useful for showing off how the product works live and unedited, adding an extra level of credibility to your marketing. Also, it can be difficult to predict what kinds of questions people will ask until you’re in the kind of live dialogue that Periscope provides.

2 – Q&A sessions

You don’t need a physical product to host a Q&A session. In fact, if you’re an established thought leader within your niche, a free Q&A session can work for content marketing purposes.

After providing valuable insights to your audience during a Periscope session, you can then host the video on your YouTube channel or repurpose the key points from the video into other forms of content such as blog posts or infographics. Q&A sessions are extremely useful for injecting some humanity into your brand and making you more accessible to your audience, which Seth Godin is definitely a fan of!

3 – Behind the scenes footage

One of the reasons why MTV’s Cribs was such a popular television show was because provided audiences with a more intimate sense of understanding of their favourite artists (Redman’s career soared after he revealed that he lived in a dilapidated slum despite being an award winning recording artist). Although business owners don’t have the same draw as famous musicians (the likes of Elon Musk and Richard Branson aside), people are still eager to learn some inside information about the companies with which they do business. For the same reason that employee spotlight blog posts and team pages are effective for humanising a brand, behind the scenes tours via Periscope are also extremely useful.

4 – Broadcast news

Periscope is a very useful digital marketing tool...

Periscope is a very useful digital marketing tool…

Depending on your niche, Periscope could be a valuable tool for broadcasting industry news for your audience. Sometimes the informality of a live-streaming video might be more appropriate for discussing a particular topic than a blog post, and as you begin to get recognised for broadcasting cutting edge news, your reputation within your niche is sure to rise. This is also highly recommended for breaking news which needs to be broadcasted immediately, since other forms of content will usually take hours (or days) to produce.

Conclusion

Remember that Periscope is only a tool, albeit an extremely powerful one, for facilitating a connection with your audience. In other words, so long as you keep the connection the focus of your Periscope endeavours (rather than thinking of ingenious ways to push your brand down people’s throats), this tool can be extremely valuable for growing your business in the digital era.

Entrepreneur and virtual outsourcing expert Chris Ducker uses Periscope to great effect, and states the following:

“To put simply, the mere fact that your audience can tune in and see you live will prove that you’re real, and demonstrate that you care enough to connect with your audience, customers and prospective customers.

“None of this means you should stop posting YouTube videos, Instagram, or Twitter. It just means you should consider sharing a few of your private moments with the world – it’s all about P2P… People to people.”

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