Live Streaming Best Practice | Have You Thought About Inviting Yourself as the Guest to Your Live Show to Enhance Engagement?

Have you ever watched The Parent Trap where Lindsay Lohan played both twin sisters, or Adaptation where Nicolas Cage played both twin brothers?

In film and television, this technique - where one actor plays two roles in a single production for comic or theatrical effects - is called "dual role". And recently, this technique was brought to the live streaming world by Gabé Leal, the king of LinkedIn live streaming.

In his September episode of his live show Unfiltered Love, Gabe experimented with this technique by interviewing himself - something he said that he had wanted to do for a long time. In the show, he fully unleashed his creativity, mastered timing during "interviewing" himself, and gave his audience a super interesting and introspective show.

Interviewing yourself is both easy and hard. Easy in the sense that you just need to record your answers beforehand and bring them on stage at the right time. Hard in the sense that bringing your pre-recorded videos at the right time while you are streaming, and reacting to yourself at the right time can be very challenging (as the old adage says, it's all about timing!)

Playing with this super novel practice also has a lot of benefits:

• You can be super creative with it and set best practices for other creators who want to try it (I can already hear clapping from creators with larger-than-life personalities). The sky is the limit for playing dual roles - you can interview yourself, or do a fun skit with yourself. And even though it requires some extra work, you don't have to be perfect in delivering this dual role show. Just as Gabé said, everything doesn't have to be perfect for others to watch you do what you love doing.
• It is a great way to hook your audience's attention and supercharge your engagement. Just look at all the amazing community showed up and interacted with Gabé during his show! It says everything!
• Interviewing yourself is a great opportunity for you to get introspective and think through some questions you might otherwise not have time to do, and give your show a personal touch. It's also a great opportunity for your community to know more about the real you, and get closer to you.

Gabé certainly mastered the art of "dual role", but one thing he might not know is that in a theatrical production where more than one actor plays multiple characters, it is sometimes referred to as an "Ironman" cast. We wonder if he can bring in more guests to form an "Ironman" cast for his show, and think further outside the box. We look forward to more amazing show from Gabé!