Can we all agree that live streaming is having a moment? You know you have received the little live notification more than a few times in the past few weeks. The impact of the Coronavirus has more creators and small businesses turning to live streaming options left and right. People are improving their live streaming skills and platforms are improving their streaming experiences with features like enhanced analytics and filters. Facebook is even going to add an option to charge for live streams.
So if you’re feeling that now is the time to try Facebook live, you’re absolutely right! (Doesn’t it feel good to be right?)
And if you’re still on the fence, allow us to convince you.
- 20% of videos are live videos on Facebook.
- Facebook Live videos produce 6x as many interactions as traditional videos.
- Facebook users are 4x more likely to watch live streams than recorded videos.
- Users watch live videos 3x longer than traditional videos.
Of course, the stats are fantastic but, let’s be real, it can be a little nerve-inducing to hit that “Go Live” button. What if you stumble on your words? What if no one joins live? What if you start to ramble?
WE GET IT! Going live is scary but you know, scary isn’t always a bad thing. Scary means you get to be brave. Being brave means your opening new opportunities. We want to share this little clip from our resident livestream expert, Megan, for some inspiration.
“Perfection is not a human trait. Perfection is not a relatable trait. Saying “uhms”, stuttering, losing your train of thought – those are relatable experiences. So if that happens on your live stream, just own it! People will understand.”
Being relatable increases that ever-important Know Like and Trust factor. So don’t worry about being perfect on your live streams, instead focus on delivering valuable content and engaging your audience.
Hopefully, you’re feeling ready to go live on Facebook. Now, we want to share our favorite tips for making the most of your lives. Let’s face it, we’re all busy these days and if you’re going to create content, you should make the most of that content – even after the live is over!
1. Have a content theme for your Facebook live
Lives don’t have to be one-off chats or AMAs. You can and should theme your content for your Facebook lives so they fit into your existing marketing plan. This is going to reinforce your message and it can lead your audience to consume your other content about that theme. When we plan our content at MeetEdgar, we make sure our email content, blog content and video content all overlap in their topics so we’re sharing a cohesive message and we’re able to offer more resources and content to our audience around specific topics.
An easy way to do this is to use a variation of the hub and spoke content model. In the hub and spoke content model, the hub is one large content topic. For example, let’s say our large content topic or the hub is “Facebook Lives.” Then we’ll want to brainstorm all the topics that make up Facebook Lives.
So the spokes of Facebook Live content would be:
- Step-by-step guide to creating a Facebook live
- How to feel confident on a Facebook live
- The best tools for Facebook live
- How to repurpose a Facebook live
Once we have the hub and the spokes, we can identify which spoke is a better blog post, which is a Facebook live, which is an email and what are social media posts. So if you’re not sure what you should talk about on Facebook live, look at the content you are talking about on other platforms and brainstorm from there!
2. Structure your live video
You don’t have to write a script to master Facebook live but you should have a general structure so you don’t go off-topic, which is very easy to do on a Facebook live! You can structure your Facebook live however feels best to you but we love including a few of these elements in our Facebook live structure.
- A great hook. You’ve got to get your viewers hooked right from the beginning. You can do this with a question or with physical motion, like pretending to knock on the camera, that grabs people’s attention.
- The promise or desired outcome. What will the viewer learn during your Facebook live? What is the desired outcome you’re promising to share with them? Remember people don’t consume content just because it’s there. They consume because they want to achieve something. There needs to be a desired result for them to stick with your live!
- Q&A. Viewer engagement is important on lives so you should be encouraging questions but it can be distracting to constantly stop your planned content to answer them. Try having a Q&A at the end. Encourage people to share their questions and answer them all at once at the very end.
- A Call To Action. What do you want your audience to do after they’ve watched your live? Join your email list? Follow your page? Purchase a product? Whatever it is, you have to encourage them to do it with a call to action! Your audience can’t read your mind and they won’t know what’s the best course of action for them unless you tell them so don’t be shy about it.
3. Be consistent with the times and days of your lives
You can never guarantee that people will show up for every live but one way to make it easier for your audience is to go live at a consistent time or day of the week. Check your analytics to find out when your audience is most active on Facebook and arrange your Facebook live around those times and days.
4. Crosspost Your Live Videos
Facebook isn’t the only place you can go live. LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram allow for live videos so why not go live on every platform? We use StreamYard to broadcast our live streams on Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. By simul-casting your live streams on different platforms, you can reach more of your audience without any extra effort!
5. Upcycle Your Lives
In true Edgar fashion, we don’t want you just using your lives as a one-time piece of content. Make that content work harder for you by upcycling that video. Video is valuable content on every social media platform. If you have fantastic video content, don’t leave it just sitting on your Facebook page.
Here are the four things we do with every one of our lives to get the most out of our Facebook live video content.
Upload them to Youtube
Since we use StreamYard, this is automatic for us but we add all of our lives to a playlist so our Youtube followers can easily catch up on them.
Transcribe them into blogs
We use Rev.com to transcribe our videos and then we create blog posts out of them. We also include the original live video in the post in case anyone wants to watch the video instead of reading the post. This helps the SEO value of our website and increases traffic to our blog pages.
Crosspost them as an IGTV episode
IGTV is another video platform that is becoming more popular. If you don’t have time to create even more video content for IGTV, reuse your lives! Ever since we started crossposting Facebook lives into IGTV episodes, we’ve seen more followers and engagement on our Instagram page.
Cut up the video and use them as social media posts
Even if a Facebook live is only 10-15 minutes long, you can get at least 5 different video clip that you can use for social media posts. We often do this to create video content for our Twitter page since we don’t go live on Twitter very often. And just like we saw more followers and engagement on Instagram, we’ve started seeing an increase in engagement and followers on Twitter because of this video content.
That’s it! Follow these steps for your Facebook lives and you’re sure to see more viewers, a larger audience and more engagement on your socials.
And you know what? Once you get the hang of Facebook lives, you start to love them! You’ll be having realtime engagement with your audience, growing your audience and building a library of video content to upcycle and reshare.
We go live on Facebook every day during the week! Follow us here to tune into our next live!
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