How to Reach a Bigger Webinar Audience with Restreaming

Key takeaways:

• Restreaming sends your live webinar to platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook at the same time. It's an easy way to reach people who'd never visit your registration page, and live video performs well on social: LinkedIn's own video team found live broadcasts get 24 times more comments than regular videos.

• Social viewers see the stage, not the room. Video, slides and screen sharing are included, but chat, Q&A, polls and CTAs stay in your webinar platform, so say key links and poll results out loud.

• Not every webinar should be restreamed. Panels, launches and open educational sessions are a great fit, while paid webinars and hands-on workshops usually aren't.

Every webinar has two audiences. There are the people who found your registration page and signed up, and then there's the far larger group who would have watched if the webinar had simply shown up in front of them. That second group spends its time on LinkedIn and YouTube, and most of them might never visit a registration page on their own.

Restreaming lets you reach them without changing how you host. Your webinar runs as usual, and a copy of the live broadcast goes out to the social platforms of your choice at the same time. It's one of the easiest ways to grow your reach, but it also changes who sees what, and the webinars that get the most out of it are the ones planned with that in mind.

This blog explains what restreaming is, what your social audience actually gets to see, which webinars are worth restreaming and how to set it up.

What is restreaming a webinar?

Restreaming a webinar means broadcasting it live to one or more external platforms, such as LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, at the same time as it runs on your webinar platform. People can watch wherever they already are, while registered attendees join the webinar room as usual.

Behind the scenes, restreaming uses RTMP, the standard protocol most live platforms use to receive video. The destination platform gives you a stream URL and a stream key, you add those to your webinar settings, and your webinar platform sends a duplicate of the live stream there.

You'll also see the term multistreaming. The two are often used interchangeably. Multistreaming usually refers to sending a single stream to several platforms at once, often through a dedicated tool, while restreaming is the broader term for passing a live stream on to somewhere else. For a webinar host, the result is the same: one broadcast, several places to watch it.

4 reasons to restream your webinars

A registration page is great at converting people who are already interested. It's much less good at finding new people. Restreaming flips that around by putting your webinar where discovery happens.

1. Live video gets pushed. Social platforms tend to favour live content because it keeps people on the platform and talking. On LinkedIn, the difference is significant: LinkedIn's video team reported that live broadcasts get 7 times more reactions and 24 times more comments than regular videos from the same broadcasters. When your webinar goes live on your company page or a LinkedIn event, your followers can get notified, and every comment helps it travel further.

2. There's no form to fill in. Some people want to see what a session is like before handing over their email address. A restream lets them drop in, get a feel for your content and your speakers, and decide whether they want more. For many of them, that first impression is what brings them to your next registration page.

3. The recording keeps working. Platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube typically keep the broadcast on your page once it ends, so the webinar continues to collect views long after the live session is over. That's extra reach from content you've already produced.

4. It fits almost any webinar goal. Whether you run webinars for lead generation, customer education, community building or internal communication, restreaming gives the same content a wider stage. The question isn't really whether restreaming helps, but which of your webinars benefit from a bigger, more casual audience.

What your social audience sees, and what they miss

This is the part most guides skip, and it's the one that matters most when you plan a restreamed webinar.

A restream includes everything in the video area of your webinar:

• Video and audio of presenters and anyone else on stage

• Presentation slides

• Screen sharing

• All of it shown in the layout you've chosen

Everything else stays inside your webinar platform. In WebinarGeek, that means viewers outside the webinar room don't get the chat, Q&A, interactions such as polls, quizzes, calls to action and infoboxes, video injections, sales pages or evaluation forms.

In practice, you're running a webinar for two audiences at once. Your registered attendees are in the room: they can ask questions, vote in polls and click your call to action. Your social viewers are watching the show. Neither experience is wrong, but they need different things from you as a host.

A few habits make the show work for everyone. Read poll results out loud instead of just displaying them. Mention your key links verbally and put them on a slide, ideally as a short URL or QR code. If a question comes in through Q&A, repeat it before you answer so people watching elsewhere can follow along. None of this takes extra time, and it tends to make webinars clearer for your registered audience too.

Which webinars should you restream?

Some webinars thrive in a bigger, more open setting. Others lose some of their value when they're broadcast to anyone who happens to scroll past.

Strong candidates for restreaming:

• Thought leadership and expert panels, where the goal is visibility and the conversation on stage is the main attraction

• Product launches and announcements, which benefit from as many eyes as possible in the moment

• Industry events and keynotes, where a live broadcast gives people who couldn't register a front-row seat

• Open educational sessions, where sharing knowledge freely builds trust with a new audience

Think twice before restreaming:

• Paid webinars. If people paid for access, broadcasting the same content for free on YouTube undercuts that.

• Hands-on workshops and training. When the value lies in exercises, quizzes and back-and-forth with the trainer, social viewers get a much thinner version.

• Webinars with confidential or customer-specific content. A restream is only as private as the destination you choose.

• Sessions built around video injections. Restreams don't carry them, so you'd need to rework the format first.

For gated lead generation webinars, it depends on your goals. If registrations are your main metric, a restream may take some of them away. If you're focused on reach and brand awareness, the added visibility can be worth more than a few extra form fills, especially when you give social viewers a reason to register for the next session.

How to set up a restream in WebinarGeek

In WebinarGeek, restream destinations are part of your webinar settings, so there's no separate streaming software to install. You can restream to platforms like YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn.

To add a destination, edit your webinar, go to "Webinar" and choose "+ Add restream destination" under "Restream destinations". Pick the platform, enter the stream key and, if the platform asks for one, the RTMP URL. Your settings save automatically, and you can add a second destination the same way. The Help Center article on restreaming walks through each step with screenshots.

Once it's set up, there's nothing else to remember on the day. The restream starts and stops automatically along with your webinar, and you can check its status during the broadcast by clicking the "REC" button.

A few platform-specific points are worth planning for:

• YouTube: schedule your live stream in YouTube first, then copy its stream URL and key into WebinarGeek. That way, the upcoming stream is visible on your channel in advance and people can set a reminder.

• LinkedIn: you need access to LinkedIn Live on your profile or company page. Creating a LinkedIn event ahead of time lets you promote the broadcast before it starts and gives your stream a clear home.

• RTMP webinars: restream destinations don't work for RTMP webinars. Are you hosting RTMP webinars? Please refer to this article instead. Our guide on restreaming webinars with OBS and Restream walks through that setup in more detail.

Tips for a restream that runs smoothly

Test with a real live session. Dry runs are never restreamed, even when destinations are configured. To check your setup, run a short live test broadcast before the real one, and watch it arrive on the destination platform.

Swap video injections for screen sharing. Because restreams don't include video injections, share any video you want to show through screen share with audio. Your social viewers will see it along with everyone else.

Keep an eye on the destination. The status panel tells you whether the restream is running, but it's worth having someone watch the stream on LinkedIn or YouTube itself during the webinar, just to be sure it looks and sounds right.

Give social comments a moderator. Comments on LinkedIn or YouTube won't appear in your webinar chat. Ask a colleague to follow the conversation there, reply where they can and pass good questions on to the presenter.

Measure both audiences. Your webinar statistics show what happened in the webinar room, while view counts and comments on each social platform tell the rest of the story. Look at both to see how much reach the restream actually added.

How to turn social viewers into registered attendees

Reach is great, but most teams also want some of those social viewers to become registered attendees, subscribers or leads. That works best when you give them a clear reason to make the move.

Offer something that only exists in the webinar room: a live Q&A at the end, a downloadable resource, a certificate, access to the replay or a bonus session. Mention it early and again near the end, and put the link on screen so people can find it without searching. You can also use the restream as a trailer for your next webinar, closing with a short pitch and a registration link for the follow-up session.

Over time, this turns restreaming from a one-off reach boost into a steady flow of new people discovering your webinars, trying them out on social media and then choosing to join the full experience.

Frequently asked questions about restreaming webinars

Can I stream my webinar to LinkedIn and YouTube at the same time?

Yes. With restreaming, your live webinar is sent to several platforms at once. In WebinarGeek, you add each platform as a separate restream destination in your webinar settings, and they all go live automatically when your webinar starts.

What's the difference between restreaming and multistreaming?

The terms are often used for the same thing. Multistreaming usually describes sending one stream to several platforms at once, while restreaming is the broader term for passing a live stream on to another platform. For webinar hosts, both mean one broadcast that people can watch in several places.

Do viewers on social media see the chat and polls?

No. A restream includes what's on stage, such as presenter video, slides and screen sharing. Chat, Q&A, polls, quizzes and calls to action stay inside your webinar platform, so it helps to read poll results out loud and share important links on screen.

Can I test a restream before my webinar?

Dry runs in WebinarGeek aren't restreamed, so the best way to test is a short live broadcast with your restream destinations configured. Check that the stream shows up correctly on each platform before your actual webinar.