Helm › Helm University › Track 8 › Lesson 8.7
Lesson 8.7Polls, scheduling, and what does not happen automatically
Polls are engagement and nothing more, and a scheduled stream does not start itself.
Prefer to listen? This is the same lesson, word for word. The text below is the transcript.
This lesson prepares you to: Use polls correctly and schedule a show knowing exactly what Helm will and will not do for you.
Polls
You can run one poll at a time. Creating a new one closes the one before it.
- Question up to 140 characters.
- Between 2 and 4 options, each up to 40 characters.
- Any signed in viewer gets one vote, and can change it.
Be clear about what a poll does: nothing except ask. A poll cannot pin a product, cannot change a price, cannot unlock anything, does not feed discovery, and does not appear in your stats. It is a way to make a room feel involved, which is a real thing, but it is not a mechanism.
Use it to decide what you pin next and then pin it yourself.
Scheduling a show
You can set a scheduled time when you create a stream, and change or clear it later. There is no limit on how far ahead and no minimum notice.
Scheduled streams appear on Helm's upcoming list if they are public and discoverable, covering the next 7 days, up to twenty of them.
Nothing happens at the scheduled time
This is the important one. A scheduled stream does not start itself. There is no job that fires, no automatic broadcast and no countdown that does anything. You press go, exactly as you would without a schedule.
What the schedule does is get you listed as upcoming, and give Helm something to match your broadcast against when you do go live. If you press go within 30 minutes either side of your scheduled time, Helm links the two together.
Leave a scheduled stream unstarted and it is eventually marked missed, which happens lazily the next time a list is read rather than at a precise moment.
Nobody is notified that you scheduled
Worth planning around. Scheduling sends no reminder or notification to your followers. A push goes out when you actually go live, not when you announce that you will. If you want people to turn up at a time, you have to tell them yourself.
Two scheduling systems
There is a second, separate schedule that Helm staff maintain, with recurring slots and a 90 day horizon. Sellers cannot create entries in it. If somebody at Helm has scheduled you, that is what they used, and it is linked to your actual broadcast by the same 30 minute matching.
Before your first show, a checklist
- Payout state reads ready. Nothing else on this list matters if it does not.
- Every product you plan to sell is active, approved and in stock.
- Staged in the order you will sell them, in one pass.
- Moderators appointed, knowing they cannot touch the products.
- Somebody told, because scheduling did not do it for you.