How long should a livestream be
Minimum 30 minutes
Go live for 30 minutes minimum. It will give people time to connect and follow the action.
No maximum time, apart from your own endurance (you can also plan to have someone to relay you: in that case, use a burner you can hand over to the person instead of your personal smartphone!)
XRUK Livestream Team record was a 9 hours live during the April Rebellion in 2022, which was made possible thanks to multiple experienced livestreamers. No one expect such a long live from a local group action 😉
Engage with your audience
Your audience will have more time to figure that you are live and click on the video to watch it. Especially if you wrote a cool blurb!
That will give you more time to tell the whole story (and repeat it once in a while for late viewers).
If you do a short livestream (less than 10 minutes), then another one just a few minutes later, your audience might think that the livestream has ended and won’t watch the next bit.
So make sure to plan your livestream when something exciting is happening, take your time to show the whole action, talk about it and interview people.
Thirty minutes is actually no much time to do all that!
Share the link of your livestream
Doing one big livestream instead of multiple ones means you’ll have a unique livestream link to share around to encourage people to watch.
If you have someone at home, this person can send this link via email to your local group’s mailing list and ask people to watch, engage with the live or even join you in the streets.