Although everyone is talking about live commerce today and its outstanding performance in instant transactions, the live streaming format has its inherent flaws.

The launch of the OPPO Find X2 is a typical example: on Weibo, the brand first leveraged celebrity fan effect to heat up Li Yifeng's confident eyebrows, building brand awareness. Then it set up the official #OPPO Find X2# hashtag, using the brand topic page for brand building and creating a "reservoir" in public traffic. Next, it used super fans to preheat the launch event information, capturing private traffic that could reach target users and warming up the brand topic.

Once the reservoir was filled, the live stream needed to release the water at a high level to create an explosive effect. The most direct way is to achieve multi-point high exposure and all-round multi-channel traffic diversion to truly build momentum. To achieve this effect, relying solely on live room traffic is not enough. Especially for brand self-broadcasting, the brand's own traffic is far from sufficient to create a wave, so it must leverage various public and private traffic tools.

Even OPPO, mentioned earlier, when its brand awareness and heat reached a national level, invested heavily in additional traffic tools on Weibo during the official Find X2 launch live stream, comprehensively intercepting attention. This ultimately resulted in over 75 million views of the launch live stream and significant topic reading effects, showing the leveraging power of traffic tools.

In addition to the dissemination of traffic tools, the ability to create hot topics is also very important.

For example, Heytea, a highly popular internet-famous product, can easily become a trending topic with any small move. Recently, because several Weibo lottery draws selected fans of competitors, it "hit the trending list," and the topic reading volume reached 730 million in just two days. At the same time, Heytea itself has the ability to create memes. By interacting with the official Weibo lottery platform account and several competitors, it drove fans to frantically tag competitors, attracting attention while leaving a fun and playful brand impression.

Heytea's case is about riding the wave to create memes. For product launch marketing activities, brands need to conduct refined operational planning spontaneously. For example, before the vivo S6 launch, the brand used spokesperson Liu Haoran's nickname "selfie black hole" and collaborated with major entertainment accounts to plant memes in advance. During the live launch, the brand connected with Liu Haoran to "submit homework" by taking selfies with the new product, instantly highlighting the product's "selfie expert" label.

Among all the trends this year, none has attracted more attention than live streaming. From last year when Viya and Li Jiaqi broke out across the internet and became top traffic figures who could chat with Jack Ma, to this year when Luo Yonghao "went to sea" to start a new business and his first live commerce session brought in 160 million yuan, and Dong Mingzhu's live stream sold 310 million yuan in one session, equivalent to Gree's annual e-commerce revenue—online and offline, it seems that not talking about live streaming means being out of touch with the times.

But while brands are eager to try live commerce, celebrity entrepreneurs like Dong Mingzhu and Luo Yonghao, as well as experienced streamers like Li Jiaqi, often make mistakes. Coupled with rising costs, how to do a good live stream has become a common challenge for brands and merchants.

What worries brands more than making mistakes and trending is that if a live stream ends with no audience, no conversions, and no sales, it is perhaps more embarrassing than a nationwide failure. In the second half of live commerce, where everyone is rushing to enter, to have a lively and bustling few dozen minutes in the live room, you need the support of an entire brand ecosystem built outside the live room.

The Inherent Flaws of Live Streaming

The primary issue is the strong real-time nature of live streaming: a live stream can last several hours, but basically no user will stay in the live room the whole time. Most users will not spend hours listening to the streamer talk about products. Even Luo Yonghao, whose first Douyin live stream had over 10 million views, had a peak online audience of only 2.9 million.

At the same time, users entering in real time find it hard to keep up—this is why streamers only talk about a product for a few minutes; because users' attention does not stay focused on the live room for long, it must be short, fast, and direct to achieve promotional effects.

Therefore, the overall narrative of live streaming is completely non-linear and fragmented, which means live streaming is actually not suitable for brand building: it is difficult to tell a brand story in a few minutes, and viewers in the live room rarely have the patience to listen to one-way output. Some brands' attempts in this regard have not worked well. For example, Dong Mingzhu talked about Gree and her entrepreneurial story in her first Douyin live stream, and from various feedback, users did not buy it. Therefore, in brand communication, other actions outside the live room are necessary to supplement.

Due to the strong real-time nature, live streaming also has strong interactivity and strong unpredictability, which is a great challenge to the streamer's on-the-spot ability. The various failure cases that repeatedly hit Weibo trending topics illustrate this problem—it can be said to be one of the biggest challenges live streaming poses to enterprises.

Corresponding to the strong real-time nature is the weak shareability of live streaming. On the one hand, video content lasting several hours is difficult to spread, a hard problem that has existed since the era of show live streaming. Even Li Jiaqi, who started live streaming in 2017, became famous through the viral spread of "OMG" short videos. Now that many competitors have flooded into live streaming, it is extremely difficult to become famous solely through live streaming itself.

On the other hand, there is another reason for the weak shareability of live streaming: under the concept of the live "room," the inside and outside are clearly divided, and the two different communication fields are completely separated. Most live streaming platforms do not have a public domain for discussion; a live room is equivalent to a separate private traffic pool, and it is difficult for different live rooms to naturally interact with each other. Only through tools like co-streaming can traffic be generated. This is why Li Jiaqi's hot topics from each live stream need to ferment on Weibo trending, and even his apologies are issued via Weibo posts. The fundamental reason is still the poor shareability of live streaming itself.

Correspondingly, live streaming also has a characteristic that, under the influence of short video platform algorithm distribution, the funnel effect of the live room is actually strong. After a live stream ends, it is difficult to guarantee that the same group of users will watch the next one, and new users are not easily retained, so traffic reuse is poor.

Take Luo Yonghao's live streams, for example: the first session had 10 million cumulative views, but by the sixth session, although still supported by Douyin and with a total fan base of over 10 million, cumulative views had dropped to less than 6 million, and the peak online audience was only 300,000—this is despite Luo's own topicality and repeated trending due to "failures." This shows how difficult traffic reuse is.

From this, it is also clear that a complete "live stream" is not just the few hours in the live room: to truly do live streaming well, you must run a complete closed loop from initial user touchpoint to retention and long-term operation.

To Do a Good Live Stream, the Work Is Outside the Live Room

Just like the saying "a minute on stage takes ten years of practice off stage," the journey from reaching consumers to completing instant conversion in the live room is often funnel-shaped. It requires a lot of early water storage and bedding, simultaneous heating, and later secondary fermentation and refined long-term user operation to truly realize the value of live streaming.

First, it is important to build the brand before the launch. The strong real-time nature of live streaming means a strong sense of ritual: if there is not sufficient preheating before the live stream, it is difficult to obtain sufficient and effective traffic. Only with adequate early water storage can you make the final shot during the live stream.

In addition, considering the split between inside and outside interactions, it is also important to continuously grasp the direction of public opinion after the live stream ends. It must be mentioned here that to do a good job of secondary dissemination of live content, the real interactive public opinion battlefield is still on social media like Weibo. Consumers may make impulse purchases in the live room, but they may also jump out to search for information again, especially for high unit-price products like mobile phones and 3C products. At this time, brand information guidance is very important, and multi-dimensional information such as reviews will have a secondary effect. After the vivo S6 launch, the brand collaborated with over 630 KOLs across the platform, with a total reading volume of 189 million, ensuring the whole network's heat after the live stream ended.

In addition to KOLs, in the era of rising KOCs, ordinary users and fans must also be taken care of, especially to improve the efficiency of traffic reuse in live streaming. Long-term brand fan community operation is essential. In the live room, instant communication and interaction are strong, but individual fans are hard to attend to. Refined customer and reputation management must also be done outside the live room.

For brands, in 2020, live commerce has passed the stage of whether to do it, and has transitioned to the challenge of how to do it well. To successfully produce a live stream with a complete instant explosion, in addition to technical infrastructure, it is more important to build a complete chain of brand building and traffic conversion.

The commercial value of live streaming is definitely not limited to a few minutes of viewership and limited-time transaction volume. To truly do live streaming well, long-term brand ecosystem building outside the live room is even more essential.