What is Facebook Live?  Let’s start with the basics.

Facebook Live allows you to broadcast live to your audience and talk about whatever you want.  So what might you want to talk about?

• New product launch
• Q & A session
• Behind the scenes footage
• Information about current products

What Equipment do you Need?

When you’re just starting out you really don’t need more than your mobile phone, or a computer with a built-in camera. You don’t need a full production studio with multiple cameras and professional mics.

What should you know before you go live?

Practice, practice, practice!  Go to your Facebook page and click “Start a Live Video.”  This should be right under where you write a post.  From there you’ll have a lot of settings on the right side of your video. Select your personal Facebook page and then select “Only Me” from your privacy settings.  Then away you go!  You can feel comfortable going live and recording what you want and no one will see it.

Key things to check is your lighting, audio and just an overall comfortableness with the camera.

Your Facebook Live strategy should be part of your overall content marketing plan.  If you plan on making Facebook Live a regular part of your strategy then plan the content out in advance so you can make sure they are all connected.  Remember quality over quantity and consistency matters.  Keep your customers coming back to your page each week for a series, or monthly for new product launches, whatever makes the most sense for your business.

Make sure you know what you’re going to talk about – write out an agenda so you don’t miss topics you want to touch on.  Remember – even the most seasoned professionals have scripts for their live posts!

When Your Live.

Your customers are right in front of you (even though you can’t see them).  Don’t forget to interact with them.  Acknowledge that they are there.  See a regular customer of yours?  Say hi and make them feel special.  If you can have someone help you with answering comments and questions that is even better.

What to do with the Live is Done.

You probably didn’t get to all the questions and comments that people asked during the live broadchast.  No sweat!  Once your Live is completed then the video will remain on the feed or group that you posted it to, as will all the comments.  Go back through and answer them within 24 hours.  This not only helps with customer service to your audience, it also creates more engagement on Facebook to give you more reach.

If you have a YouTube page then it’s also a great way to repurpose this stream by uploading the video to your YouTube Channel.

Want to take Your Live to the Next Level?

So maybe you’ve done a few Facebook Live videos and you’re ready to have a more professional look.  Or maybe you need more options like interview style videos with someone else that isn’t in the room with you.

If you’re a small team and want to make sure your phone stays steady throughout the shoot we love the iographer products for Apple products.   These products help with stability and ensuring you have a steady shot.

At H & E Marketing Solutions we love BeLive for live streaming.  There are several features from screen sharing, to talk show formats and custom branding.  And while those features aren’t free – they are totally cost-effective.

Conclusion

Don’t be scared of live posting.  It is a great way to be authentic with your audience and learn from them about what they like, need, want from your products and services.

Are you aware of the significant changes Facebook made on January 11th of this year?  You will need to midify your strategy or get left behind.  There is no question that Facebook is the place that most business play.  With more than 2.072 billion monthly active users and more than 40 million small businesses with active pages, it is definitely the place where most people live socially and offers great opportunities to target your audience.  So now that we are moving into 2018 what are the things you need to know about marketing on Facebook?

Marketing Update from Facebook

On January 11, Mark Zuckerberg posted an announcement on his Facebook page that rocked marketers and small businesses everywhere.  This announcement has been a long time coming for many of us, but nonetheless, it is still changing the way that businesses will interact with Facebook.  Let’s break it down!

1. Building Community

“We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That’s why we’ve always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness.

But recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.”

Facebook has long been announcing that they want to build communities and meaningful relationships between their users.  Now they are defining in more depth what that means to them.  Research has shown that people that interact on social media feel more included and those that participate on the sidelines (just scrolling through feeds) can cause feelings of loneliness and detachment.  Facebook is taking this seriously and therefore giving more importance to your personal news feed based of what your friends and families are interacting with.

2. Diminished Organic Reach for Pages

Pages include business, celebrities and media.  Facebook will now be giving priority to posts from your friends and family.  Posts from pages will not be served unless their is interactions on that post.

“For example, there are many tight-knit communities around TV shows and sports teams. We’ve seen people interact way more around live videos than regular ones. Some news helps start conversations on important issues. But too often today, watching video, reading news or getting a page update is just a passive experience.”

So what does this mean for your business?  Your posts need to be authentic and all about your story and who you are.  What builds community around your brand that gets people talking?  If you don’t then your posts won’t reach ANYONE!

3. What is the state of video?

In 2017, video was ranked higher in the algorithm than photos.  It didn’t mean if it was live or a video you uploaded.  That is now changing as Facebook feels that passively watching a video doesn’t build community and while the watch times were fine, they were not interacting with the posts.  Moving into 2018, Facebook Live streams will be the key to getting visibility to your business.  Facebook Live creates engagement and interaction with your audience.  Check out our tips for an easy Facebook Live!

4. Should I be on Facebook for my Business?

Yes!  Now I don’t think you need to be active on Facebook daily or even monthly but having a Facebook Page for your business helps in so many other ways.

• People often look at business on Facebook and having a presence there gives you more legitimacy in the eyes of the consumer
• Facebook pages often show up on the first page of Google if people are looking for you – help them find you!
• It’s FREE!

Conclusion

Yes this is a big change that Facebook is rolling out – but it isn’t the end of Facebook.  It might change the way you market your business but it also is encouraging more engagement with your audience – and that is never a bad thing.

Let us know what you’re doing to change your strategy on Facebook!  Or let us know if you have any questions.