I’ve just completed about a month on Periscope, and I wanted to share some observations and results with you.
I originally heard about Periscope for business through Kristian Cotta and Jeremy Montoya down at the monthly business education presentation at the Scottsdale Civic Center Library. It took me a while to get on because I had to acquire new hardware (iPhone). I tried different tactics to use it on the platforms I already had, but when I was successful in getting something to run under Windows, the applications couldn’t broadcast. So, the iphone.
I created my accounts right about Thanksgiving, but didn’t start broadcasting in earnest until December. Holidays do tend to significantly impact my activities, so this “first month” is really about 3 weeks worth of daily scoping.
Actually, I have two Periscope accounts, @ricknovy supporting my author side, and @novytechcopy supporting my business side.
I’ve been focusing on the author account mostly, so it is far more mature in terms of audience. I plan to scope on both during business days in 2016, hopefully in synergy with my blog. I’m set up for the first week or so on the business side, but I’m behind here. That’s why you’ll see me talking about the movie Sisters on Periscope today, and not about Periscope itself. On the business side, the blog post was on white papers, and so was the scope. As I said, i’m a little further ahead over there.
In any event, let’s look at some numbers. I am currently following 30 accounts. Most are people know who don’t necessarily do much scoping, others are people like Ringo Starr, who comes on from time to time. The rest are generally accounts providing quality content. That’s what I’m trying to do here, provide quality content.
As I write this, I have 49 followers. I tend to pick up a couple with each broadcast and a couple more from replay viewers (which are not insignificant). I have blocked 6 accounts, most of which have names with sexual connotations. I have broadcasted 36 times, a few of which were garbage and I deleted the replays. The first few were figuring out how Periscope works. I have accumulated 2633 hearts, which are like “likes.” They seem to come in bunches.
I get the most activity when I talk about controversial subjects, which I usually do on Fridays. I tend to get repeat visitors when I read some of my work. I have been archiving my broadcasts to my phone, and I’ll eventually be posting the broadcasts that can stand alone without comments on my YouTube channel.
That’s the summary of where things stand. I think it’s still too early to tell, but I’m told about 80% of accounts have under 20 followers, so I’m still building myself up as somebody to view. I’ll give another update after the first quarter.
