Racking up ‘likes’: How to navigate Facebook Live and beyond

Welcome to...

// The tenets of a successful broadcast

// Why is live video having a moment

// How to create your broadcast

// How to choose a platform

// Choosing the right setup

// Case Studies

AGENDA:

12K VOD videos

300+ live shows

500+ branded content videos

15 Billion video views

A little bit about me...

On an ordinary Friday in April of 2016….

11M+

Total Views

807K

Simultaneous Viewers

320K

Comments

CLEAR HOOK AND PURPOSE ● Could these producers make a watermelon explode? How

many rubber bands would it take?● No matter where you entered in the broadcast the purpose

and story was clear and easy to get

ANTICIPATION● The promise of a good payoff gave audiences a reason to stay

to stay and watch ● The suspense grew the more rubber bands were added and

the watermelon swelled

EMOTION● The two producers conveyed genuine emotion the closer they

got to the explosion. ● The audience feeded of their emotion and amplified it across

social media.

Why did this video have the effect that it did?

A REASON TO BE LIVE ● A large audience gathered waiting to experience the magic

moment together● Could this of been done as a VOD? Yes, there are hundreds of

them if you search on youtube. However, the live aspect captured anticipation and joy beyond what is possible in a short VOD.

FOMO● Audiences got excited and posted everywhere creating a

moment that got others excited

TRENDING FORMAT● The exploding watermelon capitalized on the The slow TV trend

was exploding on facebook at the time. It involved watching mesmerizing, simple visuals like cutting sand or making a clay pot

WHAT MAKES LIVE SO SPECIAL???

Over the past few years live video has evolved to a viable opportunity for brands looking to create a deeper connection with their audience

Live video is having a moment . . .

★ At this years past NewFronts event, brands including Buzzfeed, Disney, Barstool Sports, and Vox Media, all announced plans to launch a slate of live series

★ HQ, a popular live video interactive trivia app, goes live twice a day and receives 1MM viewers on average

★ Platforms are racing to offering new live streaming capabilities and promotion techniques. Each platform is trying to win by offering better ways to engage your audience. Competition is good!

★ More audiences are engaging in real time conversations with live VS traditional VOD

★ Live technology has radically reduced in cost, become easy to operate and the quality is fantastic

Platforms are in a horse race to be the destination for live

Why brands love live

★ Grow followers

★ Increase retention and audience engagement

★ Drive brand awareness and expand reach

★ Engage with fans in “real time”

★ Beat Facebook’s fickle algorithm

★ Livestreams are great for SEO. Facebook gives preference to live videos in Facebook Graph Search results. YouTube promotes YouTube Live videos to the top of relevant search results while the video is live on air

★ Convert viewers to paying subscribers/customers

★ Real time engagement and response makes people feel more invested in the content

★ Suspense, FOMO, and instantaneousness

★ You never know what’s going to happen next. But what you do know is this: If you don’t tune in, you’ll miss it entirely

★ People can speak their mind and feel heard

★ Audiences have a voice in what happens and can experience the moment together

★ The lack of editing gives audiences feeling of intimacy and honestly

Why audiences love live

CREATING YOUR LIVE BROADCAST

You need a reason to be live

★ Identify the right content to broadcast live. Is this something that will build a passionate audience? Will your content and message be stronger because it is live?

★ What is your motive? If your not clear on the purpose, the audience won’t either

★ Is live video the right way to deliver the message? Why go live over creating a VOD?

As live becomes more commoditized throughout the industry, you need to have a purpose to go live. Don’t go live for the sake of being part of the buzz.

Set your goalsWithout a clear set of goals it is hard to tell if your broadcast was successful and achieved what you set out to do.

The most important aspect is to learn from your experience so you can make it better.

★ Increase sentiment around your product?

★ Get email signups?

★ Increase time watched?

★ Convert subscribers?

★ Increase engagement with your audience?

★ Grow your followers?

Developing your format and creativeGood live broadcasts are formatted to grab your attention and keep you engaged. Flesh out as many of the following tactics as you can:

★ A unique hook that will draw people in

★ Continuous teases of everything great that is to come

★ Interesting guests

★ Anticipation and a payoff

★ Easy to follow along no matter when you join

★ Interaction with the audience

★ Quick pacing

★ Emotion & smart discourse

★ Topics that are current and on trend

★ Social conversation and FOMO

Develop your own set of creative filters that are unique to your brand and can be applied to all your live broadcasts. At POPSUGAR we created this…

Developing your format and creative

Your talent is the centerpiece

★ If you cast a social influencer, be sure they can handle the demands of a lengthy live show. Sometimes this is hard to tell especially on instagram.

★ Make sure those appearing in your broadcast are comfortable not just talking to a live audience, but interacting with them, even though you can’t see them!

★ Establish talent as real people you want to get to know. Pepper their conversations with real-life anecdotes that show a connection with the content

★ Make sure they speak to the audience a lot vs just others on camera. Write engagement opportunities into the script: ask Qs, reference comments, respond to feedback.

★ Have the talent add reminders for viewers watch, subscribe, comment and share

★ Keep your audience tuned in by having the talent tease something that you’ll be doing or featuring later. Regularly reinforce the name of your show and what it covers.

Talent needs to be quick on their feet, keep the broadcast moving and the energy up all while charming your audience. No easy feat.

When should you go live? How long?

★ Where is your audience? Accommodate people joining EST and PST

★ Think about the schedule of your audience. Where and when will they be in front of their computer and able to watch?

• Pregnant moms are ready to consume your Live session on Monday afternoon

• Teenagers at the ages of 18–22 are in the right mindset on Saturday morning

• Folks at work are eating their lunch in front of their computers between 1-3pm

★ Think about relevant TV broadcasts that may give you a boost

• During the Final Four, Capital One (which ran a series of March Madness ads starring Samuel L. Jackson and spokeswoman Jennifer Garner) saw an average 300 percent increase in social engagements in the two minutes following its TV ads.

★ The longer you broadcast, the more likely people are to discover and invite their friends on Facebook to watch the video. Don’t bother going live for less than 15 minutes.

★ Don’t go too long so you can’t program it full of interesting content or you talent starts to ramble,

Timing could be critical to your success

If content is king, then marketing is King KongDon’t make marketing an afterthought.

★ Schedule your Live post. PLatforms like facebook allow you to create a link to the live show so you can market

★ Set the date and time well in advance. Create a graphic that you can splash on your website, Facebook pages, blog and other social media properties to announce your live event.

★ Get your talent to promote

★ Countdown to the event. Send out regular reminders up until the event. On the day of the event itself, increase the frequency of reminders to a countdown-type reminder system to generate excitement and enthusiasm.

★ Write a catchy description before going live - A great description will capture people's attention and help them understand what your broadcast is about.

★ Ask viewers to subscribe to Live notifications. Remind your audience that they can tap on the Follow button on live videos and videos that were live so that they can get notifications the next time you go live.

★ Use popular hashtags and tag your location

★ Take advantage of the ads platform to promote your posts helps you reach people that don’t already follow you.

Interactivity is the name of the gameInteract with your followers regularly and create reasons for them to engage.

★ Say hello to commenters by name; respond to their comments live. Your audience will be thrilled to hear you mention their name and answer their questions when you are live.

★ Flash graphics of your audience's comments on the screen

★ Conduct a poll, game, Q&A or “ask me anything” sessions

★ Run a contest or giveaway. Try to make the giveaway item relevant to your brand. It’s got to be exciting, but not so far away from your core value that it attracts the wrong customers to your event.

• Giving away a big screen TV will get a lot of followers, but unless your business sells electronics, customers may tune in just for the TV. A free consulting session, signed copies of your new business book, and similar items related to your core business are great ideas for a giveaway.

• Get creative with how people enter. Like and Tag are good, but maybe try Trivia.

★ Give the audience the power to control an outcome in the content by their vote or simply ask them what they want to see

★ Skype in your audience

★ Get your audience to talk about themselves and share something personal

The key is,” added Kornlift. “And then building up an audience leading to the event, defining the right content distribution strategy (i.e. where and how the content can be viewed/consumed), and deciding how to best leverage the live content once it’s recorded and archived.”

Choose a platform: FacebookFacebook Live is the default live video platform. It’s the one that will give you the most eyeballs for your content and the biggest reactions.

★ Notifications to followers

★ As you’re broadcasting, you’ll be able to view the number of people watching. A stream of reactions will flow across the screen and you’ll see a scrolling list of comments as they come in. While Twitter has only hearts, Facebook offers a broad range of reactions.

★ Broadcasts can last up to four hours, and in addition to the usual video analytics, you’ll also be able to see the number of peak live viewers, people reached, reactions, comments, and shares.

★ Facebook Live gives you the ability to choose an audience, so marketers can segment their follower lists and create unique content for each group. The detailed analytics are vital for tracking results and experimenting with different content.

★ Once a Facebook Live video is created it will reside on your page or profile for viewers who missed the live event to view. Videos are eligible to show up in an individual's news feed during the live event, as well as after the event has ended. Yet, the chances of seeing a video while it’s live are now higher since Facebook has updated their ranking algorithm to show more live videos that are streaming in real-time.

★ Businesses using Facebook live on their pages have the ability to customize and control their audience once it has ended. Page followers and visitors may get a notification when a page or individual is going live.

★ The biggest benefit is the size of the audience. Facebook can give you the largest audience of any social media platform.

Choose a platform: Instagram Stories LiveInstagram may have started as a photo-sharing app, but recent changes are geared toward vying with Snapchat for the attention of young audiences.

★ The standout feature of Instagram’s version of live video is the temporary nature. If your audience doesn’t see the broadcast when it goes out, they won’t get a second chance. While this does severely limit the size of the audience your video can receive, it does give fans a reason to keep checking the stream.

★ One way to think of Instagram’s live video is less as a broadcast channel than a large Skype chat with only one microphone. You’ll struggle to win new audiences or large audiences, but Instagram live video will help to cement the audience you’ve already built since they have notifications.

★ While you could use Instagram in the same way you use Facebook (for launches, tours, Q&As, interviews, and behind-the-scenes moments), it’s best to use Instagram for short chats and demonstrations with your most loyal customers.

★ Live videos are also shown on Instagram’s Explore tab, and videos that are trending based on the number of viewers, location, and engagement are pushed to the top. That gives broadcasters an incentive to hit a big audience, but it takes no more than a swipe to move to the next live story.

★ Instagram live videos can last up to an hour, and friends will receive a notification when you’re live. The profile photos of users who are live on Instagram are marked in the Stories bar at the top of the feed.

★ Only accessible from the mobile app. No ways to share links and not embeddable.

★ Not ideal for pro broadcasting setups. However, very easy to go live with just your phone!

★ Feeling lonely while livestreaming via Instagram Live? Worry not: You can invite your friends to join you.

From Digiday: The live video pendulum has swung from Facebook back to YouTube. YouTube channels are seeing a lift in live video viewership

Choose a platform: Youtube Live

★ Events feature gives you greater control of the live stream by setting it up ahead of time. You can preview before you go live and market it and you can start and stop the stream when you want.

★ Live Automatic Captions were added to YouTube in 2009. And 1 billion videos have been automatically captioned since then. Now YouTube is adding English automatic captions to live streams. This makes live streams easier to follow along without sound.

★ Live Chat Replay has been available on facebook, twitch and IGSL and now is finally coming to youtube. Live chat is a feature that allows the YouTube community to connect with creators. Many video creators take questions and respond to the community directly from the chat window.

★ YouTube Live creators can now add location tags in order to add context to their mobile live streams and video uploads.

★ Super Chats is a feature that enables creators to monetize their videos and live streams. YouTube users that are watching a live stream can purchase a Super Chat, which is a highlighted message that appears in the chat stream that sticks out from the other comments in order to get the attention of their favorite creators. Super Chats are pinned to the top of the chat for up to 5 hours, depending on the amount that is selected.

★ It is against Terms of Use to include third-party advertisements in live streams. This includes burned-in commercials (for example, video content from a television feed).

Twitter is ramping up its video offering by signing deals with 30 broadcasters, including some serious heavyweights.

Choose a platform: Twitter Live

★ Your live video can go anywhere that a Tweet can go. This means that it’ll be searchable in the Twitter app, on the Twitter website, and it can be embedded on other websites just like any other Tweet. It will also exist and be searchable on Periscope, which powers live videos on Twitter. If you add a location to your live video Tweet, your video will be discoverable on the Global Map on Periscope.

★ At this time it is not possible to schedule a broadcast to automatically go live at a future time. It is possible to create broadcasts in anticipation of a stream that will occur in the future. However you will need to manually publish that broadcast at the desired time.

★ Twitter followers will only get notified of new broadcasts if there has been a Tweet created with the broadcast via Producer in Media Studio. Twitter will push notification to those Twitter followers that have elected to be alerted when your account has a live broadcast.

★ Tweets containing the broadcast can be promoted on Twitter via an ads campaign. Campaign objectives that support broadcasts currently are: Promoted video views, in-stream video views (pre-roll), and Tweet engagements.

★ Tweets containing a broadcast can be monetized on Twitter by associating it to a sponsorship program.

★ Once a broadcast is ended, it turns into a video-on-demand replay video that is accessible from Twitter or Periscope. Any Tweets that had been created during (or after) the broadcast was live will automatically show the replay and start at the beginning of the video.

★ You can comment and send hearts in any live video you’re watching. You can also interact with other members of the audience by tapping on a comment to view the account profile, respond to a comment, or block the account.

★ Live broadcasts are widescreen and are accessible from periscope and twitter

Be prepared and practice! practice! practice!A live show is like a should be coordinated like a wedding. Plan carefully and practice everything.

★ Your technology will fail you at some point, so have redundancies.

★ Don’t underestimate your Internet. If you’re going live using cell towers at an event then think about how they will be affected once others start using their phones. Invest in a wired connection!

★ Prepare some people with questions to kick off the conversation in chat.

★ Start with a beat sheet to plan out everything you want to do and get your team on the same page.

★ Write script so your host understands how to relay critical information about your brand.

★ Rehearsals are so the production team can pull all the various jobs at the same time. Graphics, Shooters, Producers, Talent all need to be able to find their groove. Don’t plan rehearsals the hour before you go live.

★ But, in the end you need to embrace the imperfections. Mishaps are bound to happen, and these things are actually what makes live video so much fun. Be humble when the mistakes happen and just keep going. This will add personality to your video, and also help your audience see that you’re a real human, with flaws, just like them!

CHOOSE THE SETUP THAT IS RIGHT FOR YOU

When is comes to gear, there are endless options

★ Camera. Will one be fine or do you need multiple angles?

★ Microphone -- preferably external mic

★ Switcher such as a tricaster

★ Encoder - can we software or hardware depending on needs - obs, wirecast, teradek, liveU, tricasters,

★ Bitrate: the quality you are streaming at 4 Mbs for 720P stream

★ Platform: YT, FB, IGSL, etc

★ Streaming intermediary Like periscope

★ Internet connection

These are the basics. You choose how complicated you want to make it!

Low cost and simple setupEquipment that combines everything you need in one device

★ Very low cost: >2

★ Combines the camera, mic, encoder and streaming software

★ Can be operated with just a producer

★ High chance of something falling

★ Quality can suffer

★ Being cable free makes things simple, but you can lose signals

Med cost and setupSimple setup but some professional components

★ Med cost: 3-10K

★ Separate out the camera, mic, encoder and streaming software.

★ Should hire a small team: Shooter, Audio, Live tech at a minimum

★ Still a high chance of something falling unless you have a backup

★ Quality will be much better

High end cost and setupComplicated setup, but most reliable and great quality

★ High cost: 10K+

★ Multiple cameras switched in real time. Separate components with redundancies in case something fails

★ Should hire a sizable team: Shooters, Technical Director, Director, Audio, Live tech, Graphics operator

★ Pro quality

CASE STUDIES

Case Study #1: Florida’s Natural

★ The 2016 presidential debates left a lot of the country frazzled, annoyed or downright angry. So the marketing team at Florida’s Natural orange juice decided to lighten the mood a little by teaming up with Funny or Die to create their own debate: Pulp, No Pulp, or Some Pulp.

★ In this impeccably acted Facebook Live video, three candidates (Pulp, No Pulp, and Some Pulp, respectively) campaign for America’s love … Fox News-style.

★ Two more livestreams continued the conversation through a variety of debate styles, generating over 514,000 views and over 7,500 social engagements. It’s pretty amazing to see how deeply the general public feels about pulp (or lack thereof!)

Case Study #3: General Electric

★ GE got all fancy with their Facebook Live campaign and actually hosted a 360-degree livestream called “The Creators Circle” in which they highlighted the brand’s Relax, Refresh, and Reveal LED light bulbs.

★ Over the course of a three-hour livestream, host Nina Hajian interviewed social influencers Cat London, Dschwen and Alicia D’Angelo in creative spaces engineered towards their artistic expertise (with the appropriate light bulbs to match, of course). Viewers of the 360-degree livestream could move from room to room to see how each influencer was using their bulb during the creative process.

★ The Creators Circle certainly delivered the cool factor by allowing users to turn their phones or tablets and see a 360-degree view of the room, but it was equally impactful to see these beloved influencers in creative spaces, doing what they do best. This campaign racked up almost 1M views

Case Study #3: We Work★ WeWork started using Livestream to reach their global employee

community live and in real time

★ While the popularity of the platform spread through their organization, they decided to start using it for their ‘Creator Awards’ events, where they celebrate up-and-coming entrepreneurs. WeWork users, and employees, around the world gather at WeWork locations to watch these events live.”

Case Study #4: Lightricks★ When you have raving fans, they tend to become your best

advocates; the best way to create mega-fans is to make them really, really good at using your product.

★ The folks at Lightricks understand this profoundly, which is why they started a Facebook Live campaign to show users how to create really remarkable pieces of photo art. For example, in their latest video, a designer details each step to creating a mesmerizing desert scene cube using Enlight Photofox.

★ Unlike the usual tutorial videos, Facebook Live allows the audience to respond to the presenter via the comments section and they actually get their questions answered. This not only increases audience engagement, it allows for better product innovation.

★ “We believe that what makes these Facebook Live tutorials unique is the genuine interaction between our app users and ourselves,” says Daphne Kasriel-Alexander of Lightricks. “We haven’t noticed competitors offering this, and we’re unsure why, as it’s so valuable all around.”

GET HELP IF YOU NEED TO

// Contact me, Jordan Allen

// Social video consultant agency

// jordanballen@gmail.com

// https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanallen/

THANK YOU

APPENDIX

★ On Facebook, 78 percent of audiences are already watching live video regularly

★ Recent reports also show that viewers of Facebook Live videos comment 10 times more than they do on videos that are not live because they can engage in the real-time conversation with other viewers.

★ According to Facebook, live videos have six-times the engagement as non-live videos