I’ve been a little bit absent from podcasting for the last few weeks, something that usually happens when I stumble across a brand-new app or social network. This month I’m all about periscope. Periscope is an app that allows you to live stream video from your iPhone or your Android device. As it’s a live stream, and it’s done through the app, you don’t need to bother with any fancy equipment or filters. So what you get is raw, real footage. It takes down a lot of the scary barriers about video production.

If you haven’t used it before, all you have to do is download the app, sign in with your Twitter account then get started.

You can simply watch other videos or record your own, which gets shared to Twitter as soon as you go live.

When you hit record, you’ll be able to see any comments from other people watching live (you can limit this is just people that you follow or make it public) and hopefully if you’re doing it right they’ll also be able to double tap the screen to give you a heart or series of hearts (much like ‘liking’ something on Instagram). The more hearts you get, the higher you climb up their listings of videos to watch.

Videos then save for 24 hours, so you can watch them back after. People can continue to ‘heart’ your videos during this time, but they can’t comment – that’s only for the live feeds (although you can view the comments in the replay)

As a freelancer what kind of things could you share?

I follow a huge variety of people on there from British Beauty Blogger‘s beauty hauls, to daily videos from a man called Revbeej who shares Scopes of him feeding hummingbirds at sunset from his hand. Oddly, some of the most popular videos are of the simplest things – cooking meals, going for walks or room tours.

Here are just a few ideas of scopes I would love to see on Periscope from freelancers:

• Office tours. I love seeing people’s working spaces and even a one or two minutes video would be fantastic.
• A Q&A about what you do. As you can take questions live, there’s a lot of opportunity to do Q&A video, which is a great way to spread the word about the niche you work in
• Share quick tips. This is a great way to build up a good reputation by sharing quick tips regarding whatever you do as a freelancer
• Are you Digital Nomad that travels lots for work? I want to see the places you go and the interesting things you see!
• Tell me about a tool, app or something you’ve read recently that you’ve loved. I’d love to see mini reviews on Periscope.

• You can download the videos at the end of the broadcast to be uploaded to Facebook or YouTube which can be very useful if you think it’s like the one up there for longer than 24 hours as videos do am expire on a periscope after that time
• Utilise hashtags. Your scopes will be automatically shared to Twitter, so be clever with your titles and use appropriate hashtags. You can also use Twitter usernames in your titles.
• Beware of trolls. Trolls will inevitably pop up at some point in your scope with silly questions/abuse. You can tap on their name and block them while you’re recording.
• Don’t go overboard. 1-2 scopes a day is about right, any more than that and I tend to unsubscribe pretty quickly (unless they’re very short and sweet)