7 things we learnt from World Ballet Day 2016 — the longest-ever Facebook LIVE
By Tom Nelson, Creative Producer, Royal Opera House
Over the past three years, here at The Royal Ballet we’ve worked closely with colleagues at The Australian Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, National Ballet of Canada and San Francisco Ballet to deliver World Ballet Day — an annual celebration of classical dance with a 20+ hour-long live-stream at its centre.
The live-stream sees participating companies take it in turns to stream around 4–5 hours of behind the scenes rehearsals, interviews and insights, bunny hopping across the globe. It’s become a focal point of the dance world’s calendar and this year the event had a reach of more than 135 million.
The event was based upon the success of Royal Ballet Live in 2012 on YouTube. These big ‘tent-pole’ events are a big factor in pushing our YouTube channel above 200,000 subscribers and making it the most subscribed-to YouTube channel of any arts organization in the world.
But this year, we tried something different: we switched platforms to Facebook Live. It was a calculated risk — Facebook has by far the biggest user-base of any social platform in the world and offered the potential to dramatically enhance our reach.
So, what did we learn?
- The majority of viewers watch with the sound off
Our statistics indicated that 64% percent of the World Ballet Day audience on Facebook Live watched with the sound-off (currently the default setting, although Facebook have indicated that they’re experimenting with in-timeline sound-on). While this is less than the 85% we’d expected from earlier audience studies, it clearly has implications for the kind of content that’s most effective on Facebook Live. Ballet is a very visual art form, which helped our cause, but it was noticeable that viewer figures did tend to dip whenever we switched to interview segments.
2. Average viewer duration was dramatically shorter than expected
The average viewer duration on last year’s YouTube stream was 18 minutes. Porting the event over to Facebook saw averages take a dramatic tumble to just below 3 minutes. It seems that while perfect for discovery and dipping in and out, Facebook’s audience is more transient than YouTube, with Google’s platform better suited to those who know what they want to watch. It was also noticeable that at present, Facebook Insights don’t offer the same level of analytics that YouTube does, though as the platform bolsters its livestreaming offer, this should hopefully improve.
3. Engagement on Facebook is totally different to YouTube
While YouTube is notorious for video commenting, it was immediately noticeable that Facebook users tend to be far kinder and more positive in their comments. Perhaps this is because commenting on Facebook is linked to users’ real names and there’s therefore less of a chance to hide behind pseudonyms. It’ll be interesting how recent changes to YouTube commenting — intended to moderate harassment — have an effect on Google’s video platform.
4. Young women were more likely to engage
Everyone knows that women are more into ballet than men, but we noticed the commenting was greatly skewed towards women as well. Our biggest demographic was 18 to 24-year-old women (24%).
Most arts organizations are extremely keen to engage with younger audiences, so this heavy skew towards the youthful end of the spectrum was a real positive. Although Facebook’s average user age metric has gradually been shifting upwards, it was heartening to see our content reach younger audiences in such numbers.
5. Scheduling pre-event activity reaps rewards (and post-event material shouldn’t be neglected)
Facebook encouraged us to deliver more pre-event content to build anticipation for the event. We therefore developed a programme of engagement videos for the days and weeks in the run-up, including experimenting with 360-degree content. These garnered more than 3.3m views in the build-up and boosted page likes, ensuring new subscribers were served the related live-stream content.
We knew from previous World Ballet Days that highlight material would prove to be a big draw, and this continued this year with extracts adding many millions of extra views. To keep the considerable YouTube audience that we’d built over previous years happy, we made sure we uploaded these to YouTube as well.
6. Working in (exclusive) partnership is a big draw for Facebook
If we at the Royal Opera House/Royal Ballet had gone to Facebook on our own, the offer wouldn’t have been nearly as compelling. For the technology provider, it’s the international and collaborative nature of the event that has the real appeal and elevates it above other proposals.
Facebook were also keen to ensure that the stream was exclusive — fair enough given the level of support they gave it. We needed to commit to posting the full relay exclusively with them, as well as using Instagram extensively. While we were able to promote the event via Twitter, it was a term of the agreement that we’d prioritize using Instagram Stories over Snapchat.
7. Prepare to be surprised
Our biggest audience outside of the UK was in Mexico City and to be honest, we have no idea why.
While we’re not quite at the point of conducting all live stream activity on Facebook, the event was definitely worth doing, for its reach alone. We’re yet to hammer down a definitive strategy and are keen to maintain an agnostic approach, choosing whichever platform meets our audience aims — for brand awareness and profile, Facebook was perfect; for longer, more in-depth content aimed at our core audience, YouTube is probably still king.
For the next World Ballet Day in 2017, who knows where we’ll be. But what I can say is that Facebook’s streaming offer can only be a good thing for the sector, and we’re keen to experiment more with it.
