Introduction
The world’s leading social platforms are going all in on Live services, and audiences are showing us they’re hungry for it. People want to talk to their influencers in real time, buy from their influencers in real time, and love the exclusivity of time-limited content.
The brand opportunities are there, but rules of play are a little different to traditional ‘on-demand’ content. To edge out the competition and make sure your livestream efforts hit their mark, we’ll help you understand:
- The different features of TikTok LIVE compared to Insta Live
- How to reach your target audiences on each Live platform
- The different approaches to building organic interaction and lasting engagement on Instagram Live Vs TikTok LIVE
- The distinct revenue models for TikTok LIVE compared to Insta Live
- Why applying the same strategy across both Live services could cause you problems
- Which platform you should choose for your next Live-enabled campaign
Contents
- Platform Overview
- Audience Comparison
- Engagement Metrics
- Monetisation Opportunities
- Content Strategy Considerations
The Rise of Livestreaming in Influencer Marketing
Livestreaming has grown up. While Insta Live launched in 2016 and TikTok LIVE in 2019, it wasn’t until the pandemic that they really took off.
Insta Live usage surged by 70% in the U.S. between March and April 2020 alone, reflecting a desire for real-time connection that started during lockdown and hasn’t abated since.
Almost 70% of US content creators went live on Instagram in collaboration with a brand in 2024, and that number is only climbing. TikTok LIVE crossed the 100 million livestreamer mark in the same year, and saw over 30,000 live shopping events hit the fyp over the 2024 holiday season.
In 2025, more than half of marketers rated livestreaming as their leading content strategy for influencer campaigns.
Why Brands Are Investing in Live Content
Livestreaming offers a level of connection between influencers and their followers that – in the digital realm at least – basically can’t be topped. Research suggests that interactivity, emotional support and a sense of community are the foundations of ‘social presence’, a key driver of user engagement, and livestreams deliver these in spades.
Users can drop comments with the expectation of getting near-instant responses from their peers or the influencers they’re watching. They also know that what they’re seeing is raw, unedited, and happening right now.
Live content doesn’t just offer a chance for audiences to connect more deeply with their community. Given the growing depth of ecommerce and real-time shopping integrations, it offers a shortcut to exceptional levels of brand trust, product confidence and motivation to buy – with just a click or two between viewers and checkout.
Platform Overview
Here’s a quick rundown of the key features you’ll need to know going in when it comes to using Instagram Live or TikTok LIVE.
Instagram Live: Key Features and Functionality
Eligibility to go Live
- Account at least 30 days old
- No minimum follower count
Before your broadcast
- Schedule a Live up to 90 days in advance
- Users can view Live details and sign up for reminders
- Add up to 3 co-hosts to join the livestream and present
During your broadcast
- Four hour time limit per Live
- User-user and user-host interaction through live comments and reactions
- One single moderator (must be assigned and separate to co-hosts)
- U.S Streamers can receive badges, earning them a share of the badge fee paid by viewers
- Use filters and effects in real time
After your broadcast
- Live video saved to Live Archive after broadcast ends
- Options to save to camera roll or share as a Story, Reel or Profile post
TikTok LIVE: Key Features and Functionality
Eligibility to go Live
- Minimum 1,000 followers (many vary across regions; some exceptions, including for TikTok Sellers)
- No violations of community guidelines
- Minimum age 18 to use LIVE, and send or receive gifts
Before your broadcast
- Schedule a LIVE up to 10 days in advance
- Promote the scheduled Live with TikTok promote or related organic content
- Set the livestream duration in advance
- Add products to your LIVE product showcase from your connected TikTok Shop in advance
- Prepare LIVE Shopping Ads to boost engagement and track performance
During your broadcast
- 60 minute time limit per LIVE
- Host up to 8 additional guests who can join the livestream
- Moderation permissions granted individually by creator (up to 200 moderators)
- User-user and user-host interaction through live comments and questions
- Streamers can receive LIVE Gifts, exchangeable for digital currency (which can be exchanged for real-world currency or rewards)
- Use filters and effects in real time
- Add products during your livestream and pin them for visibility
After your broadcast
- Live video saved to LIVE Replays after broadcast end
- Download or post full video or clips to your feed
Audience Comparison
Instagram Live Demographics and Reach
When you launch your livestream on Insta, the platform will send a notification to all of your followers (or Close Friends, if you want to narrow your audience) who can then join in watching and commenting on the broadcast.
While the algorithm might place your Live into the Explore page or recommend to people based on other content they’re consuming, it’s not generally going to expand your audience beyond existing followers.
Instead, consider your co-hosts carefully. Given that all of their followers will be notified about the livestream, and can be easily folded into any pre-Live hype building, collaborating with relevant influencers will allow you to massively expand your potential audience and deftly target at the same time.
TikTok LIVE Demographics and Reach
On TikTok, your LIVE will not only be shown to yours and any guests’ followers, but it could crop up on anybody’s feed while they’re scrolling the fyp.
This is a powerful engine for viral growth, and we’ve seen many livestreams from relatively small influencers absolutely explode.
Above all, TikTok will promote interesting broadcasts that are drawing engagement and sparking conversation. Let this lead you.
Which Platform Reaches Your Target Audience?
These differences in algorithmic reach are subtle but highly impactful. While TikTok has the potential to generate organic growth in your audience and bring new people to your broadcast and brand, it’s less controlled.
What does that mean in practice? It means that you may gain in reach and engagement, but moderating may be more challenging, the live chat could more easily veer from your favoured topics, and your live audience may be less cohesive.
TikTok LIVE offers scale but a potentially less tight-knit community, while Insta Live may offer a lower cap on your reach but with a more controlled experience and a more unified audience. Both therefore have merit and at Goat, we’ve worked with clients to employ one or either depending on that client’s specific objectives and goals.
Engagement Metrics
User Interaction on Instagram Live
More than 100 million users launch or watch Instagram Live broadcasts every day.
In addition to reading comments as they crop up second by second on the stream itself, you can use Instagram’s native analytics suite to track everything from viewer count to interactions like comments, reactions and shares during the broadcast.
Critically, due to Instagram’s discontinuation of live shopping, you can’t feature products or connect to live ecommerce features – so there’s naturally no tracking of the sales or revenue directly generated by a livestream.
User Interaction on TikTok LIVE
You can find the total viewer count as well as peak concurrent viewer count for any session, along with likes, comments, shares, new followers and diamonds earned.
There’s also tracking of engagement spikes, which can give you insights into what’s working well in your content, as well as audience demographic info – including whether they’re first time or returning viewers.
TikTok has a dedicated LIVE Studio which provides real-time analytics during your broadcast, as well as powerful suite of reporting options after the fact, including live tracking of comments, stream performance and scene management (letting you switch layouts and content setups quickly).
Comparing Watch Time and Engagement Rates
Watch time and engagement are the two main metrics for livestreams, but they aren’t equal and the balance of their value will vary. In every case, the objective of your stream will define the metrics you should be targeting.
If your livestream is educational, comedic or narrative-led, watch time will be a prime indicator of whether your content is really catching and holding people’s attention. That being said, livestreams of any variety are long-form content; if people aren’t staying longer than on your standard content, you’re doing something wrong.
For community focused discussion, challenges and Q&A’s, comments and reacts are the currency of your success. For commerce-focused streams like product launches and flash sales, you should really treat every of engagement metric as secondary to stream-linked sales.
Monetisation Opportunities
Instagram Live Revenue Models
Instagram offers two in-platform revenue mechanisms: badges and live bonuses.
Badges are purchased by viewers and given in support of stream hosts, appearing next to the recipient’s username and earning them a share of the revenue generated by them.
Live bonuses are invite-only, time-limited bonus programs that earn creators extra income based on their stream count, duration and engagement rates – they’re not widespread, but they’re out there.
Aside from that, revenue is indirectly generated by promotion of brands or products and the resulting engagement (e.g. sales), as Instagram no longer has integrated shopping features – and its ad revenue sharing features do not apply for Live content.
TikTok LIVE Revenue Models
TikTok offers a similar, deeper reward system to Instagram through its LIVE Gift Economy. Users can purchase TikTok coins with real money to send virtual gifts, like roses, which are then converted into diamonds to be held by the creator. These diamonds can be exchanged back into real currency by the broadcaster.
TikTok has retained and is continually advancing its LIVE Shopping options via integration with TikTok Shop. Creators can add products to their LIVE Showcase, with a further option to pin specific products at different times to move focus around. Sales can be made directly from the stream, with creators earning a percentage of revenue.
That’s all in addition to the traditional approach of paying creators to feature a product or partner with a brand, driving heightened brand awareness and increased sales.
Brand Partnership Potential
Unlike static posts, livestream content allows brands to be part of an unscripted, two-way conversation, creating immediacy, transparency, and a stronger emotional hook with viewers.
More than anything, partnering with creators to integrate your brand into this experience demonstrates that you’re confident in yourself, your products, and your identity.
Livestream partnerships give brands a chance to live and breathe, whether that’s through commenting and responding to users or simply having the confidence to be exposed to public, real-time discourse.
We worked with Wayfair to activate creators across both TikTok and Instagram to create pre-live promotional content – followed with livestreams across both platforms. The benefit? We partnered the brand with influencers who interacted with the viewers, the products, and influenced positive purchasing decisions. View the full case study.
Content Strategy Considerations
As we’ve seen above, while Instagram Live and TikTok LIVE may appear the same at first glance, their distinct features make them very distinct mediums.
Apply the same strategy to both, and you’ll likely see your hard work and investments fall flat. Here’s our platform-specific recommendations for each:
Content Formats That Excel on Instagram Live
Instagram Live offers your audiences a chance to spend longer with your influencers, having intimate and genuine conversations or learning about a topic.
It’s a natural vehicle for brand storytelling, allowing you to use influencers as a personable vector for building real affinity and attachment with your brand – as well as gaining more time to explain products and their benefits in more depth.
While it may seem fleeting, post-Live content options make it a great way to add dynamism to an ongoing campaign, with extensive repurposing opportunities available for those organic, special moments that occur on-stream.
You should focus on:
- Co-hosting with a brand rep or influencer during a Live Q&A
- Live tutorials or demos using branded products
- Sponsored AMAs (Ask Me Anything) or expert panels
- Promoting brand-sponsored giveaways or events
Content Formats That Excel on TikTok LIVE
TikTok LIVE is fast-paced, unfiltered and arguably more chaotic than its Instagram counterpart. Livestreams on TikTok are inherently unpredictable due to their wider reach – your brand could come into contact with thousands of new users in a single stream, but the outcome of that is naturally harder to anticipate.
TikTok LIVE is the ultimate manifestation of the platform’s raw, unpolished ethos, and you shouldn’t forget it. Scripts, if they exist at all, should be highly flexible. This format is built for interactivity, so it needs to respond to what the audience is giving back.
Streams should be rich, snappy and still as short as possible without compromising on quality – it’s far better to close out on a high then watch your audience fade away.
TikTok’s commerce integrations, combined with the surge in its popularity as a search engine, make it the ultimate ecosystem for sales marketing.
You should focus on:
- Flash product drops or time-limited offers during sponsored streams
- LIVE Shopping sessions with brand-tagged products
- High-energy challenges or countdown events co-hosted by creators
- Viral stunts, shoutouts, or gifting incentives backed by brands
…
The Goat Agency curates the best TikTok or Instagram live experience to suit any brand objectives. Interested? Get in touch with us here for more information.
