Facebook Live Best Practices: What you should be doing before, during, and after your livestream

With 2.3 billion monthly users on Facebook, you can easily expand your organization’s viewership with the Facebook Live feature. You just need to engage them.

Facebook Live is a powerful and popular tool at your disposal. It is probably the single most impactful way to organically gain traction online. There’s also a growing body of evidence that indicates having regular, episodic content is one of the best ways to communicate with your audience: Facebook Live videos are viewed 3x longer than recorded videos, and they also generate 10x the number of interactions and comments as recorded videos.

People are increasingly interested in the interactive and accessible nature of live streams, and Live offers an unmatched level of engagement between organizations or candidates and their audience. Plus, it’s a lower lift for organizations to livestream than to record and edit a video, which can be expensive and time-consuming.

If you’re not already capitalizing on streaming, you should start right away. And even if you are, we hope the tips below on what to do before, during, and after the stream will be helpful:

Prep before for the Facebook Live:

• Be consistent with the day/time and frequency of your Lives. Analyze beforehand when your subscribers/followers are most active on Facebook, and schedule your Live around those times.
• Schedule your Live a few days before and use the dedicated link to promote it. People can sign up for a reminder and Facebook will send them notifications a couple of times before you’re scheduled to go live.
• Source questions ahead of the Live so that, in a lull, there are questions you can answer. (Avoid having obvious staff-members be the ones asking the questions — make the ask of friends and family.)
• Rehearse your Live. That may seem excessive, but it’s not. Know what you’re going to say — and say it directly and concisely. Your direct-to-camera appeal should be no more than a few minutes. The rest of the time, make it interactive!
• Test your Live a few minutes before on a dummy Facebook account/page.
• Post the link to the Live on your other social media channels 1–2 days before and again shortly before the Live starts to boost its reach (some users have notifications turned on for Group posts).

Engage with your audience during the Live:

• Ask participants to “Subscribe” in the comments or even during the Live so they’re automatically alerted the next time you go Live. There will be a button for them to do so that is automatically generated by Facebook.
• Address the questions and replies your viewers bring up. This is what engages your audience to tune into your Lives. Remember, it’s a two-way conversation.
• Utilize a third party app, like OBS, to project a call-to-action or share your screen when applicable.
• Make the Facebook Live post eye-catching and upfront about what it’s about.
• Move around and change it up! Maybe you start outside and walk inside your office to show your viewers a behind-the-scenes look at your organization. (Just make sure your background isn’t too distracting!)
• Live-tweet your Live in a thread. It’s an excuse to have active content on Twitter and relatively low lift — just pick key quotes!

Analyze your results after the Live:

• Learn more about your viewer preferences from social media analytics tools (i.e., Union Metrics, Iconosquare). You should be able to answer these questions:
• How many people were watching? At what specific times?
• What are the demographics of your audience?
• At which moments were there the most amount of engagement?
• After evaluating your results, design and stream more effective videos in the future. You’ll know your audience better and create stronger videos the more you put out Facebook Live videos and internalize the insights.
• Don’t forget to share a quick post to thank your viewers for tuning into your Live. This will help boost your viewership with those who may or may not have watched.
• While you can’t boost a Live before or during the stream, you can still boost a Live after the fact — and it may be worthwhile to boost the video to your email list. This can be done as part of a holistic email list reactivation strategy.

You can find more tips here → https://live.fb.com/tips/

Find this article useful? At A+G Digital, we help Democratic candidates and progressive organizations run cutting-edge digital programs. Need help crafting your marketing campaign or want to chat? Get in touch at amir@agdigital.us.