The One Most Important Thing To Do Before Hitting The Live Video Button
Why live video is a lot like radio.. Facebook has made live video incredibly easy. Open the app, hit the first icon and there below the text field is a button for live broadcasts. It’s almost rude not to use it. When you’re at a concert, when you’re watching your kid take his first steps, when you’ve just won the lottery, that button will be right there to share the moment with your friends. The number of friends who see it will be small, a fraction of your total number of Facebook contacts but you’ll get to share the moment. When you’re using live video to promote a business though, you want to reach more than the small fraction of your followers who happen to be online at the time. And you want to do more than entertain them for a few minutes. You want an audience that’s as large as possible. You want that audience to pay attention to you. And you want them to leave with a closer bond to your company and to your product. Some broadcasters are already succeeding. Take a look at Facebook’s own Live Map, and you’ll see a mixture of different videos being broadcast around the world. Some will have no more than a handful of viewers; others might have several thousand. The difference isn’t in the video itself. It’s in what happened before the video went live. The broadcasters with big audiences prepared. How To Prepare For A Live Video That preparation will have included a number of areas. WATCH VIDEO Why the Best Leaders Don’t Fix Everything Themselves MORE: Top 10 Business Plan Templates You Can Download Free Sharing the C-Suite: How to Co-Lead Your Company T-MobileView Doing Well by Doing Good The Founder of 2 Billion-Dollar Companies Just Bought the Most Expensive San Francisco Home Chicago Needs “Cooptition” to Win the Talent Wars Science Found the 5 Things That Drive Employees to Go Above and Beyond This 75-Year Harvard Study Found the 1 Secret to Leading a Fulfilling Life It’s no coincidence that the broadcasters with the largest number of viewers tend to be media channels such as radio stations and television channels. They already have large audiences and those audiences know when their favorite shows are on. The first act of preparation then is to make sure that your audiences know when you plan to go live. Broadcasting at a regular time each week is one good option but you can still make a one-off broadcast provided that people know when you’ll be going out and what you’ll be discussing. Pin the date to your Facebook feed. Remind people in the days leading up to the broadcast. Trail your show. You should also prepare what you’re going to say in that broadcast. When I worked in radio, I would spend at least as much time preparing the show as I’d spend broadcasting it. That preparation was fun too! Lay out your segments. Know what messages you’re going to share in the broadcast in the same way that a DJ knows which tracks he’s going to play, and know how you’re going to engage your audience. Live videos are more like radio call-ins than television shows. They work best when the audience joins in, asks questions, reacts and talks about the broadcast in the comments. So the preparation should also include knowing how to get that reaction from your audience. Just as a radio phone-in show will know which questions it’s going to ask to get the phone ringing, so you should also know what you want audience members to write in the comments. Finally, prepare your sign-off. Know what you want your audience to do when they click away… and make sure they know when your next broadcast will be.
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