The question of whether or not you can do your podcast live comes up pretty regularly when we’re chatting with prospective hosts.
It usually sounds like this:
“I want to do my podcast live so that I can engage my audience, get my content on different platforms at the same time, and have this really dynamic, easy process where I’m not going to have to do any editing and only prep once and only promote once, and that will be that.”
Sounds awesome, eh?
It really does sound like the most efficient way to podcast. And for some situations in some businesses it can be a really good option for a show. But there’s a danger you need to be aware of when you are doing a live stream and hoping to port that directly onto an RSS feed to become your podcast.
And that’s all about energy.
When you’re doing a live stream, there is bi-directional communication happening between you and the people who are watching live. You may be having an actual live audience chat, or you just may know that there are people who are with you in the moment, listening to what you say and responding to what you say.
And that’s really good energy. It’s fun. There can be fantastic business use cases for doing it.
But what it doesn’t do is translate well when somebody is listening to it on their podcast app, when they’re at the gym or when they’re doing their dishes later. And that could be a really big part of your audience. It can actually be really alienating for somebody who is listening to something that was recorded live and is now being broadcast to a wider audience. It’s not really for them, and they can tell.
Another issue you might run into, and this is especially true when you’ve got guests or a panel or a bunch of different people that you want to have on your show – the audio and video quality on a live recording. Unless everybody is using a professional mic and good recording platform and dialing in from places with great internet, the quality is going to be variable at best, and even in the best of circumstances, livetream recording quality is nowhere near as good as recording in a studio, virtual or otherwise.
And that’s fine on a live because people are there and they understand, they’ve all seen this. Lives have wonky audio and glitchy video sometimes.
On YouTube or on the podcast apps, however, you don’t get any grace when it comes to your audio and video quality just because it was a live first. It’s got to be top notch in order to look professional and that can be really hard to do with reurposed livestreams, especially if you’ve got a lot of different people involved in your lives.
So one thing that we really recommend to people, if they do want to have that kind of dynamic back and forth with their audience, is to do it as an addition to their podcast rather than make every episode live that they’re porting then onto their RSS feed.
What you can do is do your podcast normally, record it in your virtual studio, edit it, make your notes and release.
But then once in a while, maybe every month or every quarter, do a live event for your audience. And this can be a time when you do Q&A. Maybe you get guests to come back and give more feedback and do their own Q&A. Or you can answer audience questions live. It can be really, really fun to have sort of a live office hours type of event that gets you some of the benefits of doing live without compromising your overall show quality.
Just remember that what you save in time with a live show, you may lose in impact or outcome.
