In March 2015 the Twitter owned app, Periscope, launched offering a platform for anyone to broadcast live video footage for free. Since March, Periscope has experienced tremendous growth on an international scale, surpassing 10 million accounts in August this year. Jessica Ruhfus, founder and CEO of brand partnerships platform, Collabosaurus, tells Dynamic Business how she found a place for Periscope in her business and discovered remarkable, yet arguably, unsurprising results.
There were no expectations, Jessica said when she was asked to participate in Scope Day on the 7th of November. The first of its kind and with Periscope very much in its infancy, Scope Day brought together 62 broadcasters across 37 countries in a few hours.
“I honestly went into Scope Day with no expectations! It was the first of its kind with no supporting data, and Collabosaurus had one of the smallest followings of all of the participants.”
“Most of the Scope Day participants were travel bloggers or musicians, so Collabosaurus was also different in that we were coming from a business theme.”
And it was here, after ‘scoping’ marketing tips to 1215 live international viewers that Collabosaurus increased its following by a massive 2700.
“I had the second highest percentage growth of all Scope Day participants,” Jessica said.
There were no expectations but after Scope Day, that has changed. Jessica believes Periscope will continue to allow Collabosaurus to build its brand and engage with business owners using “minimal time and resources.”
Jessica said “developing a blog post with imagery, proofreading, marketing and web page set up roughly equates to an hour of my time. In comparison, Periscope takes literally 4 minutes to live broadcast, create and save reusable content, engage our audience and it automatically links to Twitter for social outreach.”
With more and more businesses appreciating the power of social media presence, it could be argued that consumers are increasingly struggling to see the wood for the trees, bombarded with content and imagery.
According to Jessica, “video is such a great way to humanise a brand, and communicate brand messages in an entertaining, engaging way. I think consumers of social media are going to demand authentic, relatable and social content from brands using these platforms.”
Collabosaurus is now planning to incorporate ‘scoping’ as part of their ongoing social media strategy; offering information, advice and resources via video.
But surely it’s detrimental to divulge ‘trade secrets’ – the life blood of a business? Not according to Collabosaurus.
Jessica said “take a look at the internet! With the amount of incredible content available online, it’s increasingly necessary to gain leads and build trust with your audience by providing them with value.
Seeming to be firmly of the view that you’ve got to be in it to win it, Jessica’s advice is that businesses should harness video marketing early in their development.
“Just like Facebook before the new algorithms took hold, brands that harnessed the platform early were able to scale quickly and see a higher engagement,” said Jessica.