A look inside NPR’s Facebook Live numbers
NPR, like many news organizations, has produced hundreds of live videos on Facebook since they became a point of emphasis for the platform last year. For a media organization with its roots in radio, live videos were a new way to reach, interact with and understand its audience. Did the 5-million plus followers on NPR’s Facebook page want breaking news, light-hearted content or something else that we had not yet anticipated?
We attacked these questions by studying the Facebook data from 306 live videos and 36 non-live videos produced by NPR in the second half of 2016.
We found that females constituted a majority (60%) of our live viewers. While the median NPR radio listener is 55 years old, we found that Facebook allowed us to reach a much younger audience. A majority (56%) of our Facebook Live audience was between 25 and 44 years of age, which mirrors the demographics of people who “like” NPR’s page overall.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that during the 2016 election season, our audience loved watching political content. A video of artists painting states red or blue on a map as results arrived on election night earned 1.4 million views that lasted at least 10 seconds. Other election features, such as a show on Donald Trump’s tax plans, coverage of the third presidential debate and our 10 facts on presidential elections were among the 10-most-watched live videos during the period of analysis.
However, our analysis showed that people also enjoyed counter-programming. Videos that we categorized as “mesmerizing videos” also appeared on our most-watched list. These videos, with rich visual content, have been a part of our regular experiments to test audience engagement. Examples include watching an Afghan ceramist at work on his potter’s wheel and a visit to a dog parade in New York. These received more than twice the engagement (comments, likes, shares and clicks per post) than other videos.
Audience retention was a major challenge but also a major driver in a video’s engagement. On average, only 31% of our audience watched live videos for more than 10 seconds. This number dropped even further when we looked at the segment of the audience who watched for at least 30 seconds. One exception was our live election day mural video, which had an average of 46% of the audience watching more than 10 seconds. Similarly, major live-streamed news events, such as the presidential debates, had 42% percent audience retention after 10 seconds.
It’s common for Facebook users to watch videos with the sound turned off. But they are more likely to watch a video for a sustained period of time if the audio is turned on. We found that 81% of viewers who listened to the live video kept watching for more than 10 seconds.
Live videos typically receive more comments than non-live videos. Within the live-video genre, shows that actively worked to engage the audience received the most comments of all. Sketch the News, an interactive game in which illustrators draw an image and the audience guesses the story, was the most-commented-on series. Head to Head, another interactive game in which editors compete against the Facebook audience to write the best headline for a story that has already been written, was the second-most-commented-on feature, generating twice as many comments than an average live video. Storytelling videos, such as P.D. Eastman’s classic 1961 Children’s book Go, Dog. Go!, got three times more engagement than an average live video.
While many of our videos were shot inside NPR’s Washington, D.C., newsroom, we frequently took viewers out of the building with our reporters. When I examined the performance between the two, I found the videos shot outdoors got 67% more audience, 45% more clicks and 71% more likes, comments and shares than the average live video (among those watched at least 10 seconds.) This result may be due to the fact that we were often reporting from major events, such as political conventions, that energized the audience.
In all, Facebook provides a unique platform for live video content. NPR found that it is a challenge to capture and hold the audience’s attention. At the same time, it provides a new opportunity for the audience to engage and participate with our journalists. There’s the potential to build significant reach and engagement with the live format if you are committed to embracing what the platform does best and using those strengths to tap into your audience’s interests.
Kunal Ranjan is an Indian journalist and a Hubert H. Humphrey fellow at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. He was a visiting fellow at NPR in December 2016.
