What advanced tools can I use to enhance my Instagram Live broadcasts?
Once you’re comfortable with basic live broadcasting, you can graduate to software platforms. Instagram now allows broadcasting through third-party software in vertical (portrait) format, which has really unlocked tremendous possibilities in the last year or two. Instagram has their own free tool called Instagram Live Producer that lets you use your webcam—many computer webcams, especially on Macs, are really good quality right out of the box. Beyond that, two platforms dominate this space: Restream and StreamYard, which cost between $20-40 per month. These allow you to share your screen during broadcasts (so you can navigate to your website, work with clients showing different pieces, show slideshows, or use any software on your computer), play audio and video, and broadcast simultaneously to multiple platforms—Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn all at once. They also pull in comments from multiple platforms, automatically save your broadcasts to a cloud library for easy downloading and editing, and most importantly, let you rebroadcast pre-recorded content as if it were live, which creates enormous leverage for the lazy marketer.
Asked by synthesized teaching point · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2026-02-24