How we doubled our traffic with LivePost & Facebook Live
Getting traffic to your site is a common problem for all publishers. And anything that might help increase that traffic is a welcoming respite. Approximately once a year there comes along a hack or a tool, that helps you double traffic to your site for a while. Until it becomes mainstream and everybody else starts doing it that is.
Enter Facebook Live
Facebook Live is an amazing traffic generating machine. The problem is that traffic mostly stays on Facebook and not on your site. The second problem is that if you’re not at an event or where something newsworthy is happening you can’t really live stream anything.
Facebook Live meet LivePost
In those moments when you can’t live stream an event because you’re not actually there, LivePost can help you out. During the 2016 US Presidential Elections, the LivePost team was busy covering everything that was happening throughout the day. Everything was going well, but we had one big issue. We weren’t getting enough traffic to our coverage.
We had seen the success of using Facebook Live in the past and it occurred to us that we might be able to pull off an interesting hack using Facebook Live to stream our LivePost coverage. This hack more than doubled traffic to our coverage and helped us reach a huge audience on Facebook. Our Facebook Live basically looked like this.
So how did we do it?
Walkthrough
Watch this video tutorial or just follow our step by step walkthrough:
- Create a story on LivePost and publish it.
The first step is creating a new story on LivePost and publishing it on your blog or on LivePost.news. If you’re having trouble publishing this on your site, check our forum to see a step by step process. Now just add some content to your story so it isn’t empty.
2. You’ll need a Facebook Business Account (it’s free).
Why do you need this? Facebook only let’s you live stream from your computer if you have a Facebook for Business account. So first thing you have to do is set this business account up. Visit the Facebook Business site for more information.
3. Download a streaming software like OBS (it’s also free).
Now we’re going to need a special streaming software to be able to live stream whatever is on our computer. Go to the OBS site (Open Broadcaster Software) and download OBS Studio. Once you’ve downloaded it and installed it on your computer open it and you’ll be greeted with a screen like this one.
4. Connect OBS to Facebook Live
Click on Settings in the lower right corner and you’ll land on a screen like the one below. Go to the Stream section by clicking the world icon on the left hand side. Select Streaming Services in “Stream Type” & Facebook Live in “Service”.
Ignore the Show all services checkbox and the Server option. Leave those as is. What we need now is the Stream Key. Where do we get this? In the Facebook Business Manager.
Go to Facebook Business Manager and go to the Publishing Tools Option. Then on the left menu look for the Videos option. Click on that and a small grey +Live button should appear near the top center of the page, next to the blue +Upload button. Click on the +Live button and this screen should appear. Remember: you can see this whole process in the video tutorial above.
The Stream Key is the last option on that screen. Copy that and paste it in the OBS Stream Settings page:
Now click Ok. Bear with me we’re almost done.
5. Now connect OBS to LivePost
Now that we’ve connected OBS with our Facebook Live, we need to tell OBS what we’re going to be streaming. Click on the big + sign in the Sources section and choose Browser Source.
Now paste the LivePost.co url in the URL text box (you can find the LivePost url in the LivePost app in your story’s settings). You can also customize the background color in the CSS settings. Just change the (0,0,0,0) to any color you want (Tip: 256,256,256,1 is White, see below).
Now just click Ok and finally click on Start Streaming.
6. Back to Facebook Business Manager
On Facebook click Next and you should see this page:
Now just give your post a Title and click Go Live.
Every time you post something on your LivePost story, people will be able to follow it from Facebook or go to your page to follow on your site!
If you have any questions please reach out to us. I know this can be a very tedious process, so feel free to send us an email to hello@livepost.news.
And if you read this whole thing, you are awesome ;)
