EP018: Ten Tips to Enhance Your Facebook Lives with Sachin Patel

Welcome to the Perfect Practice Podcast where we share the most innovative strategies to help you build a successful functional medicine business, attract your ideal patients, serve your community, and get paid what you're worth. Each episode is packed with practical steps that you can take to immediately grow your influence and serve more people. Our mission is to share golden nuggets from successful practitioners, technology experts and innovators from around the world. Your host, Sachin Patel, is a functional medicine success coach, international speaker and best selling author. He's calling in all his favors to bring this information to you so you can create your perfect practice.

Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Perfect Practice. In today's episode, I'm going to be sharing with you 10 tips on how you can enhance your Facebook lives. Facebook Live videos or really any live videos make people nervous, particularly practitioners. Now I don't know what the logical reasoning is behind this, but when you put a practitioner in front of a camera, sometimes they get really nervous. Now here's the thing. It's only for the first time that you do this are you nervous about it. Because after you do your first one, or maybe your second one, or maybe your third one, you realize that nobody has ever died from doing a Facebook Live, including yourself. But you also realize the impact that it can have and how many lives that it can prolong or save. If somebody hears your message that wouldn't have heard it otherwise, you know you've got an important message to share with the world. And Facebook Live is an excellent way to help your audience better understand what you do and what you stand for, to connect with you more deeply and also more regularly. What I love about Facebook Live is that it, if you've got some sort of structure to it, it gets super easy, it gets super fun, super engaging. And guess what? Very few other people are doing it in your community, very few practitioners are doing it. Which means it's an untapped opportunity for you to separate yourself from everybody else and become the authority on whatever topic you decide to take hold of. You know, I hang around some of the most influential functional medicine practitioners and they're under utilizing this, which means that there's an amazing opportunity for anyone who, who's ready to tap into this goldmine ability to share your knowledge with the world. Now, your message can spread far and wide through this medium and all it takes is your cell phone or a webcam or even the camera on your laptop. You don't need any fancy equipment to get this information out there. Any smartphone is capable of allowing you to do a Facebook Live. Now, what I always suggest with video is that you have obviously good audio. The audio is more important than the video, believe it or not. But I also suggest that you have good lighting. Now, good lighting is critical because it's going to boost your confidence. You're going to like how you look on camera, you know, and so you're going to be more encouraged to do it. We tend to be our biggest critics. We're going to pick ourselves apart. That's what we do. So get used to that. And then once you realize that maybe a few lighting tricks or strategies can help, then you're going to feel more comfortable with how you look on camera. What I suggest is to avoid overhead lighting. Depending on the structure of your face, depending on the shape of your nose, depending on all these little things that we. Conversations that we have in our head. Get the right lighting that suits you. For me personally, I do better with front facing lighting from a slight angle, about 30 degrees from above my face. I wear glasses, you know, so that plays a role in how shadows are going to be cast on my face. So I pay attention to these things. And when I have good lighting, I feel so much more confident and I feel so much more in my element. Now, it doesn't take fancy equipment to achieve this. It does take the right equipment, or sometimes it's just a matter of recording these videos at the right time of day. I love doing videos on my balcony and when the sun is rising in the morning, because I get the most beautiful sunrise on my balcony and I get perfect lighting for my skin tone and my features. So good lighting goes a long, long way. So find those sweet spots in your environment that are going to help you feel more confident. Now, another tip for you if you're doing Facebook lives from your phone, is to put your phone in landscape mode because the video is going to be much more repurposable. If you end up uploading it to YouTube or something like that, then you. The nice thing about that is that you're going to have the ability to upload it without those black lines on the side. So hold it in landscape, which means holding it lengthwise. So instead of holding your phone how you normally would, which is vertically, you're holding it horizontally. That's what I mean by landscape, just to have full clarity. Tip number three, it's okay to hold your camera or have it mounted on a tripod. Now, the more raw videos you have, the better. So for some reason, you people feel more engaged if your videos are not highly produced, you're going to be more engaged if your videos aren't very highly produced, because it's okay. You don't have to be perfect. When you have a highly produced video, you have to be perfect, and people are going to be very critical. But when you're doing a Facebook live from your phone, people don't expect it to be perfect and not wobbling. And so if you're holding your phone, that's okay. It's more raw. People are going to be very engaged. It's more organic. Okay? So there's a time and place for perfectionism, and there's a time and place to let things slide a little bit because the message is more important than how the video turns out from a wobbliness standpoint. I don't even know if that's a word, but you know exactly what I mean. Now, tip number four is that you want to hook your audience with a question right away. At the very beginning. You can even ask a question in the description that you're sharing of the video itself. You want to capture people's attention. You want to, you know, a good marketer or a good messenger enters a conversation that's going on in the consumer's mind. So what are people talking about? What are people questioning right now? You know, what's relevant right now? There's a concept called newsjacking. There's a whole book written about this, but the title gives it away. You just basically hijack the news. What are topics relevant to your tribe that are going on in the news, for example? And how can you add value to that conversation? How can you answer people's questions? How can you create clarity where there's confusion on a particular topic of interest? Hook the audience in, get them engaged and engage with them when they're in there. Wave back at them, Tell them to give you likes. You know, ask them where they're from. Get them to type something in. Ask a question that applies to everybody. Tell. Ask them a question like where they're from. Ask them a question about what the weather is like, where they are. I mean, something more engaging than that and more relevant than that. But. But you know what I mean. Ask them a universal question that everyone will need to answer. If you ask a question like who has headaches? Type in yes. Well, that might only be a small percentage of people unless your entire audience's headache suffers. So keep in mind, the more engagement you get, the better. Facebook algorithms favor engagement. And if you can get people engaged with hearts and likes and, you know, those emotional responses sooner in your video, then Facebook is going to show it to more people. So that's very, very important. Tip number five, get and keep the audience engaged. You know, get them continuously to share. You might want to reintroduce the topic. So if somebody's joining in, if you're five minutes in, you can say, hey, if you're just joining us right now, here's what we're discussing. You know, re engage the audience over and over again throughout the process because people are going to be jumping on and off. You know, if you do a 10 minute video, you'll notice when you look at the statistics that the average watch time is probably only one minute of the 10 minute video that you did. So which means that only a few people are going to watch the entire video. The majority of people are going to watch it for a short period of time. They might not know what you're talking about, but the fact that you're reintroduced the topic a few times might hook that person in. And if you have compelling copies, really, that's going to hook people in as well. Tip number six, in the first 30 to 60 seconds, the audience should get a clear sense of what they will know, have, and feel after watching this video. This will compel them to watch the video longer. Tip number seven, speak to the individual. So instead of saying hello, Facebook friends, which is something I'm actually guilty of, or hello, practitioners, talk specifically and directly to that person. So instead of saying you all, or hi, everyone, or hello, my Facebook family, you want to speak to the individual. Now, of course you can't say somebody's name, but you want to avoid saying everyone and y', all, you want to basically speak directly to that individual. I hope you're having an amazing day. Hello, how are you? Welcome to today's Facebook Live. I hope you are having an awesome day. So you can restructure the sentence to avoid saying you all or everyone so that that person feels like you're speaking directly to them. And this is a good tip. Regardless of whether you're speaking to a Facebook Live audience or whether you're speaking to a group of people directly in front of you, you always want to speak to the individual. Remember, enter the conversation and narrative going on in the consumer's mind. Tip number eight, end your video with a challenge or a call to action. You don't have to sell anything, but get them to do something that can help them move the needle in the right direction. What can somebody do in order to move the needle in the right direction? What website can they Go to what podcast can they listen to, what regimen can they undergo, or what habit can they change that can give them a quick win? It's okay to sell stuff that's totally okay. But if you don't want to sell anything, at least give people a challenge of sorts so that they can take some sort of immediate action so that watching the video isn't a waste of their time. Now, number nine is be consistent and polarizing with your content and the message. The more you do them, the more engagement you will get. And conflict actually increases engagement. So, you know, if you've got a message, if you've got an opinion, you. If you've got a way of looking at a problem that everyone else is missing, you know, sometimes that's going to be polarizing. But guess what? People love polarizing content. Because the cool thing that happens for you is that the people that disagree with you are going to quickly disappear. They're going to raise a little bit of turmoil, which actually increases your social juice and gets more organic reach. So sometimes a little bit of engagement like that is good, even though it might seem negative. But what's gonna also happen is you're gonna strongly attract people who agree with you, and so you're gonna gain momentum for this message and start rallying troops the more you polarize the audience, and that, again, increases engagement. And engagement is everything. Tip number 10 is if you're still super nervous about doing a Facebook Live, I've got a little hack that you can try out and you can record your video and display it only privately. So what that means is that only you will be able to see the Facebook Live. Now, if you do it and you love it, you can release it as a video. It won't be live streaming, obviously, so the engagement might not be as high. But then you've got the content out there and you can feel good about it instead of feeling super anxious or super nervous about putting this content out there and not knowing what the episode or what the video is going to turn out like. So there you have it. You've got 10 tips, things that you can do immediately. I challenge you to pick your favorite topic, the thing that you love talking about, the thing that you could say a million times, you know, forwards, backwards, with your eyes closed, standing on one leg. Start with a topic that you're really comfortable with. Do your first Facebook Live video. Do it in a private setting if you need to, so nobody else sees it. But I challenge you to simply go out there and do it. I promise. Promise. Promise you your community will thank you. You will thank me at some point in the future because you will realize that you've tapped into a gold mine of capability to be able to share your message with people who want to hear it, people who need to hear it and people who deserve to hear it. Once again I hope you found this helpful. Please share this with other practitioners. Share this information with your colleagues. We need to serve as many people as humanly possible. This movement really needs to take foothold and I want you to be part of that movement. One of the things that you can do to pay it forward for me is to share this with a practitioner that you know, a colleague, a friend, hey, even send it to quote unquote your competitors but send it to somebody so that we can elevate the level of your community's health and the health of this entire planet. Thank you. I hope you have a super awesome day.