UPDATED: How to do Instagram live movie and how to turn Instagram live movie notifications off

January 20, 2017

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In mid-December two thousand sixteen Instagram Live commenced rolling out in phases in the United States and around the world. As of Jan. 20, 2017, many – including in Europe and Asia, according to reader emails – still didn’t have it.

If you don’t have it yet, you likely should get it soon. I got it on Dec. 14, 2016. Be sure to have the latest iOS version and latest version of the app. One of my daughters has an older iPhone (Three or Four), and her older version of Instagram doesn’t have Instagram Live.

“I want that, too, Dad,” she said. Not going to happen with the older versions.

Here’s how it looks once you have it:

As of Nov. 25, 2016, live movie now works for some. I got my very first notification that day:

How to turn off Instagram Live movie notifications

Now that more and more people are getting and then attempting Instagram Live movie, we are all getting more notifications. That begs the question: How do we turn them off? Here’s how:

From your profile click the wheel on the top right:

Then scroll down and turn live movie notifications off. Effortless breezy. As far as I can tell, you can’t turn them off for specific users as of late 2016. It’s either all on or all off.

Antonia Baedt of Koenigsfilm in Düsseldorf where I spoke collective these screen shots of her being able to go live.

So, once you can go live, there’s the LIVE tab in Instagram Stories. Once live, you’ll get this:

I don’t know yet if there will be a workaround to save live movies somehow, either on the phone or in another app.

Right before Thanksgiving 2016, Instagram released an update that announced that you will soon be able to do live movie within Instagram Stories.

But, I wonder when the copying of functionalities from social media network to social media network will stop – or maybe it won’t.

In just about any network now you can post words, pictures, movie and now do live movie. At some point the differentiators inbetween networks will certainly vanish – if they haven’t already. I’m actually picturing some of our early social media adopters doing live movie from all these networks at the same time. For the record, that would require five or more cameras.

And many of the live movies that are being thrown out there are indeed not that worthwhile to witness. I’ll likely attempt live movie on Instagram, but we’ll see if it lasts. What’s different and better on Instagram? I’m not sure. It seems like just another platform copying other platforms’ functionalities.

To this point I’ve actually liked Instagram fairly a bit because it is slightly unique from others. For example, you can’t even post anything unless you have a photo. While I have seen some people post crappy stock art pictures to Instagram, many people post original and unique photos.

The Instagram Stories feature also is a nice way to post less-than-polished photos to the app. It’s similar to Snapchat, however, so another copied functionality.

Live movie does have a place in content distribution, but we want to be sure that we have a plan in place to make live shots worthwhile for our audiences.

One big drawback of live movie on social media actually is that it is live, and especially in the example of Instagram live movie, it will actually vanish once you end the broadcast.

Some social media experts out there explain that people just want to see what’s happening in the moment. And that is partially true and especially accurate if they actually catch it when it’s live. But social media viewing for me for example is kind of hit and miss. I see some things and miss others. It all depends what else is going on. That’s one reason why content creators can effectively repeat tweets. People miss them.

So some people say we should set a live broadcast schedule. Always go live at this time and on this day. And sometimes that time works for the audience and sometimes it does not.

Just looking at my own social media and blog content I can tell you for sure that much of the content has a longer shelf life than just the moment when I published it the very first time. My blog content – including movies – proceeds to draw traffic long after it was very first published. When I share again links to old Periscope broadcasts, people observe them again or in some cases for the very first time.

I’m not knocking live social media movie at all. I do it myself, but like any other chunk of a content marketing plan, make sure to know your audience, have a purpose and have unique content to share.

I’m reviewing Facebook Live, Periscope and YouTube Live in this movie:

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