LinkedIn Live Advice

Hi Kelly. I ran my first LinkedIn Live on my company page fairly recently, and it gave me a lot of anxiety beforehand because there isn’t great documentation on how to set it up properly. Here’s what worked for me and what I learned:

1. Create the event with a description, speakers (you must be connected to them to add them), and a graphic. You don’t need to connect your 3rd party streaming tool at this time to the event. This part confused me a lot!
2. Be sure you have a third-party streaming tool set up to handle a LinkedIn Live event. I used Zoom, but LinkedIn recommends Restream, Socialive, StreamYard, Switcher Studio, or Vimeo. 
3. One hour before your stream is when everything comes together. At that stage, you are able to add the streaming code to your streaming tool to ensure your stream broadcasts to LinkedIn. I found a checklist of how to do this on Zoom and went through it with my marketing operations team to ensure we were 100% set up for success. It wasn’t super clear when I set my event up, but you get that code and manage your stream from this link: https://www.linkedin.com/video/golive/manage/.
4. I refreshed the video multiple times during the stream to get new comments to show up so the hosts and guests could respond to questions in real-time. They sometimes showed up on their own and sometimes didn’t, hence the refresh.
5. You can only get information on people who clicked “attend” for the event, and even then, you can’t download a .csv of those attendees. Therefore, we found this format to be best suited for thought leadership and awareness topics. 
6. At least for us, many more people watched live than clicked “attend.” (around 100 said they’d attend) We peaked at around 350-400 people and gained 3,000+ views on the video. 

I hope this helps! 

• First, promote the heck out of your stream on LinkedIn and your other channels to get people interested and registered
• Use a 3rd part streaming service. I love Streamyard which gives you a ton of features, is pretty cheap and even offers a free version. It’ll let you add branded elements to your stream as well as manage and interact with comments. Also it has a greenroom feature to gather you guests ahead of the stream going live
• Draft a run-of-show document to give yourself a guide for where you want the conversation to go and make sure you hit the key topics you want to discuss, but don’t get too prescriptive about following it to a ‘T’ - it’s just a loose framework to follow. Leave room for tangents and real moments
• recruit a behind-the-scenes person to help manage and respond to comments so you or your host is not trying to do that while live. Prep your BTS person with links, media, CTAs etc. that you want them to share in the comments during the stream and let them know when in the discussion to post them
• Encourage your viewers to engage/ask question repeatedly throughout the stream
• be prepared when the stream goes live - it happens quick and you don’t want to have 30 seconds of dead time at the outset while you whisper “is it live, yet?” - Streamyard lets you play a countdown or preroll video ahead of your stream to offset this
• have fun with it and read comments from viewers on-air and thank them by name for commenting
• plan to save and repurpose your broadcast into more content - trim highlights out for Reels or just as shorter form video 
• I could go on, but if you hit most of these you’ll be on your way to a successful LinkedIn Live.