Periscope vs Meerkat Bake Off

It is not often that you get to do a truly side-by-side comparison of two new tools, but Gloria Bell (@gloriabell) and I (@twelsonrossman) got the perfect opportunity to do just that with Meerkat and Periscope at the Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference (#PhillyETE) last week.

We used both apps at various times throughout the conference, but at the Day 2 Keynote, we did an actual side-by-side comparison.

The reason we wanted to try live streaming at the conference is a no brainer, this has the potential to be a great marketing tool . The ability to reach more people with good content, is really exciting when you run a lot of events like we do.  

Here are the pros and cons of each with our “Bake-off” winner (and the reasons why) below.

Meerkat

Pros: Easy to set up an account

Easy to give the stream a name / title  

                       Ability to tweet comments in the stream

                       Can schedule a stream

            Ability to save broadcast

                       Can target smaller, more direct audience because no auto link to Twitter

Cons:       Cannot zoom in or increase volume

                      Need a built-in audience to gain viewers  

                      Lack of direct connection to tweet the stream makes it harder to gain audience

                      Hard to manage the chat and hold the phone

                      Need a good cellular or Wi-fi connection to make it work

                      Hard to understand the metrics for viewership during the broadcast and post

                      Lack of documentation on how to use it

           Really need a tripod for a good recording

           No post-viewing metrics

Periscope

     

Pros:

                    Setting up the account was easy

         Ability to save the broadcast

                    Connecting to and broadcasting via Twitter was easy

        Ability to tweet comments and likes in the stream, but can’t easily add

        other Twitter names in the tweet

        Easy to “title” - just like a tweet

        Direct link to Twitter makes for a larger audience but also more possibility for spam

        comments

Cons:        

   

         Can’t switch between Twitter accounts

                    Can only have one account associated with the app

                    Need a good cellular or Wi-fi connection to make it work

         Hard to manage the chat and hold the phone

                    Lack of documentation on how to use it

                    Few metrics - post view metrics much easier to see on an iPad

         Really need a tripod for a good recording

There are a lot of limitations with both apps and we are hopeful there are more features coming that will address the issues we outlined above. Both seem to be good, fairly easy-to-use tools for livestreaming, especially at events. For right now we give Periscope the edge due to its seamless integration with Twitter.  This feature alone will make it an easier-to-use social marketing tool.

It is a slight edge, though.  Even with the limitations, we see these apps as a great tool for events and smaller conferences with small budgets. The video and audio quality will not be great, but these apps will allow for broader distribution of events.  

Check out our next experiments at the Women in Tech Summit on April 18th and Chariot Solutions’ talk on Angular JS on April 22nd.