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The snarky answer is however long they need to be. But to give a guideline normally we would say no longer than an hour with the average time being about 30 minutes. Keep in mind that because this is live you are asking
people to stay 100% engaged. There aren’t commercial breaks or chances for them to take a minute to recap and catch their breaths.
We talked before about how to keep your audience engaged and part of that is breaking up your stream so people can either ask questions or just take a moment. It’s especially important to build in these pauses when you have a longer broadcast or else people will walk away and may not come back.
If there is no real need for discussion, see if you can’t keep it to 15 minutes, but remember even if there are no breaks it still needs to be fun, relevant, and visually appealing. If you go past 15 minutes, offer a break from the content. Play a related video, tell a story – anything to break up the cadence of your stream for a few moments.
If you have enough content to fill a whole hour be sure that it hits all of our points on how to keep your audience engaged. Check-in with yourself and make sure it’s as succinct as possible and that you absolutely stay on topic. Make sure you’re not repeating yourself and going on too long about a specific point. People want to feel like their time is valued so if the content is redundant or irrelevant they will just sign off. And unfortunately, once this happens you’ve lost a bit of trust which will make it a bit harder to encourage them to join for your next live stream.
Come up with a plan, set your audience’s expectations, and then stick to them. This is a learning experience for everyone so don’t be afraid to try out new tactics and switch up the length of your streams every once in a while.
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