Engaging the Crowd With Facebook Live
What’s the appeal of Facebook Live, and how can your brand exploit this exploding medium to connect with people?
If you think Facebook Live is a fad, think again. All it takes is one simple fact to show why. While paid social media advertising fights for seconds of shrinking user attention, Facebook Live videos regularly get viewers to willfully stop and watch for minutes. Minutes!
Facebook Live creates a conduce environment for your brand to form organic (not forced) connections with potential customers/users.
Live streams create a fun, spontaneous atmosphere where you can engage directly with your customers for free. You could spend thousands on a Facebook marketing campaign and not achieve the quality brand resonance that you can build with a single, well-planned live stream. If you haven’t jumped on the bandwagon yet, you’ve already missed out on hundreds, if not thousands of potential relationships.
What is Facebook Live and Why Should I Care?
Put simply, Facebook Live is a real-time streaming tool that connects you with followers and other outside viewers.
Your potential viewership is the entire Facebook user base, but it all starts with your existing followers. As your fans eat up your streams and share with their friends, Facebook will reward your popularity by sending more potential viewers your way.
According to a recent marketing study, “social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.”
Consumers just respond better to video than static advertising. Now throw in a live, unfiltered stream of content from their favorite brands, and you can see why Facebook Live is so enticing for users!
What tasty ingredient makes Facebook Live so valuable for businesses? Direct, instant connection with your most interested followers and brand advocates. This isn’t some specialized tool that only advertising firms can take advantage of. You don’t have to have an extensive marketing budget or elaborate equipment (though that helps).
All your business needs is an enthusiastic employee and a smartphone.
Key Features You Need to Pay Attention To
The easiest way to kick off your Facebook Live planning is to watch some of the experts. Try starting with the viral-video experts at Buzzfeed, who earned over 11 million hits with nothing but a watermelon and hundreds of rubber bands. Whichever pro you choose, you’ll quickly notice the flood of incoming comments from Facebook users.
User comments allow you to direct the course of the conversation, while also revealing legitimate questions from real life customers. These are questions that your marketing needs to address. Even if your messaging currently answers that particular query, it could be these users aren’t getting sufficient exposure.
One of the best parts of Facebook Live is the data you’ll have immediately after recording finishes. Unlike the footage from Instagram Live, which is immediately lost after the camera stops rolling, Facebook holds on to the video you record. You can update your sharing info for maximum outreach and immediately share the video on your business page. Pay special attention to the peak and lull viewer data to help you plan future live stream events.
Facebook also provides access to valuable ethnographic data which you can use for your customer research.
Want to know who your videos are reaching? Facebook records countless details about each user, information you can utilize for future planning.
How to Easily Connect With Your “People”
You may call them customers, users, or clients, but Facebook Live viewers are just “people”. The best streamers learn how to connect with individuals in the comments, answer them by name, and highlight their insights into your brand or product. Showing respect for your fans and viewers generates trust and respect for your brand. You can then use fan comments as fuel for future discussions and live streams!
If you want a fantastic example of how to bond with viewers before and after your streaming, take a look at Outside Xbox, a fun YouTube gaming channel and paragon of community building. The team regularly hosts live stream events, where they connect with individual fans and answer questions. Their clever trick is taking original viewer commentary and transforming it into followup videos for their channel.
Provide Value Beyond Your Product
Too many companies view Facebook as just another place to sell product. With Live, your video should provide key insights into the user experience. Get creative! Show users some of the delightful and strange ways they can have fun with your product.
Most importantly, be human. You’re building a connection, not a sale. Should consumers see your brand as unapproachable or haughty, show just how friendly and warm your team can be. Let your live stream take a silly turn and give yourself permission to look foolish!
Why You’d Be Crazy Not to Explore Live
With billions of Facebook users across the globe, ad campaigns are getting expensive and invasive. Live streaming offers your brand thousands of organic, natural connections that you can use to build lasting relationships. It’s cheap and it’s real.
With the invaluable metric and ethnographic data available from Facebook, the insights you’ll glean could provide the consumer insight your brand has been lacking. Grab your team and your followers to have a blast! Just remember, you’re not building relationships with consumers. You’re growing relationships with people.
