6 Things You Need to Know About Facebook Live Video

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Today I want to Share with you 6 things you need to know about Facebook Live. The very first thing, the most important thing is that Facebook is favoring live videos in the feed. So. So if you want more engagement on your business page, if you want more engagement in your fans, guess what? If you do Facebook Live in a way that's engaging, you can get more visibility and more engagement. Hi, my name is Shelli Hitz. I'm the best selling author of over 40 books. I'm a podcast host over at Author Audience and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine. And in this training, I'm gonna answer some questions on about Facebook Live. Several people have been asking me about it. I've been on Periscope and live broadcasting for a year. I've been on Facebook Live for seven months and so I've been using live broadcasting. And I want to share with you some things that you need to know about how to use Facebook Live for your business, for marketing. Like I said, the very first thing is Facebook is famous. And all the experts are saying that Facebook is going to go more and more and more towards video. So if you're not doing video yet now in your business, why not? You can use it to connect with your audience. Even if you do one video a week and just hop on, you can really engage your audience and reach more people with your message. So that's number one. Number two, okay, I've been doing Facebook Live for seven months. I went back and you can. Facebook gives you really good insights and that's something that you should be doing occasionally, not obsessively, but looking at your insights and saying, okay, what's going on? What was interesting? Facebook showed me that people typically only watch on average one to two minutes of each of my videos. So you don't have very long and mine tend to be around 15 minutes. You can even just get on for a couple minutes, make your point, have a micro teaching, get right to the point. And actually it might be better. But I love to repurpose mine on my podcast and my YouTube channel. So I tend to make mine around 15ish minutes. But I thought that was really interesting and a ton of people tune out after three to 10 seconds. So you want to make sure this is a huge tip. You want to make sure, you get into your content right away. Those of you that are used to Periscope, you're used to chatting and welcoming everyone. And I'm going to wait until a few people hop on. Do not do this on Facebook Live. Don't do it because people want to know. They want to get right into it. They don't waste time on Facebook and they'll just click away. You have just three, three to ten seconds to really grab their attention and let them know that what you're sharing in your video is worth them spending their time listening to it. Number three, I encourage you to use your business page for Facebook Live. I've seen a lot of people broadcasting from their personal profiles and you do get a lot of visibility. I have a ton of engagement, a ton of visibility on my personal profile, but I have chosen to primarily use Facebook Live on my business page. First of all, it's because Facebook's terms of service technically say you're not supposed to use your personal profile for business, for selling, for all these things. And I don't think they're going to come knocking on my door. But I just don't want to take that chance. Facebook is a huge part of what I do and so personally I just don't want to take that chance. I share my business related topics here, I share some things on my profile, but for Facebook Live I want to be on my business page. The other thing is I want to grow my business page engagement. I want to grow that and I want this to be where people check in for information from me, not my personal profile. Although I love for you to connect with me there. It's facebook.com shellyhits but I really encourage you to focus your videos on your business page. Someone was just asking me this today. They private messaged me and they said I, I'm lost. What do I do? How do I do Facebook Live? Basically, if you're doing it through your Facebook page, you have to do it on a mobile device. You start your Facebook Live on a mobile phone or an iPad or some sort of mobile device through the Facebook app. Then you go to where your page is and you go to post a new post and there will be a little icon that says live video. So you have to do it from a mobile device and if you want to do it from your page, you can do it. Just scroll over to there and start it from your page. Number four, this is one that I got lazy on for a while. There are a ton of editing tools for your videos. Once you're finished. Once you're finished with your live video and you finish stop. First of all, remember to save it to your camera roll. It does not automatically save like Periscope did. I hope they change that in the future because I've forgotten a couple times I've gotten flustered or I had to go somewhere right away. But you have to actually click a button that you want it to save to your camera roll. And I recommend you save all your broadcasts because that way you have them to repurpose. There is a way to save it from your Facebook page as well, but it, from what I could tell, it wasn't as high quality. So save your broadcast and then what you're going to do is you're going to edit your video. There's all sorts of things you can edit. So when you go to your page, you'll just see a little drop down arrow. On that drop down arrow you'll click edit post and you can edit and put in a title. You can add tags. And you guys, I don't know how Facebook is going to use this, but I really think that adding these tags is going to be key because have you ever noticed when you're on Facebook Live that there's an automatic other video that starts playing afterwards? And I'm wondering if they're going to start populating those with similar tags with videos that got really good engagement and so forth. I don't know, it kind of reminds me of keywords on Amazon, but this is a huge opportunity so I've been filling those in. And when you start typing it in a different keyword or different category or a different page will pop up and you can target different things. So definitely add in those tags because I have a feeling Facebook is going to be using those to help people search and find your content on Facebook, maybe even through Google searches and such. Then you can add a custom thumbnail. I've been having my graphic designer create for me custom thumbnails. So if you go to my page, facebook.com authoraudience and then right at the top there's a little link for videos. You can check there. And you can see my most recent videos have custom thumbnails with the titles on them and so forth. That is something really cool you can do after you finish your broadcast. And then this is awesome. You can add a call to action. Whatever your call to action. You should have a call to action in your video. Whatever your call to action is, you can add that after your broadcast is done. You can add that into your video Anyone watching the replay that watches till the end will get that call to action. Learn more here if you want to take them to your blog or get the book here, Buy here or download here, sign up here. That is really, really cool. Make sure you take just a minute or two afterwards. Edit that information. You can create a custom thumbnail really easily on canva.com or or wherever you create graphics. The fifth tip is that you can use live video on your page. You can use it in your groups. You can use it on a private or a public event like a book launch event page. You can use it in all of these places. And if you're interested in learning more on that, I actually did an entire live video. But there are so many ways that you can use this for both influence, exposure and profit for your business, for your books. Then finally, number six is you want to start educating your tribe on how to sign up for notifications from your page. If you check out my pinned post right now, I have all the instructions. I also created a redirect. If you go to shellyhitz.com.

It will redirect you to the instructions on how to subscribe to my live videos. Pretty cool, right? And you can read all those. I know that it's going to be changing. I know some pages still don't have the notifications for live video like I do because I actually got access to Facebook Live seven months ago. And so because I had access early, I think I have certain features available early that other pages don't have yet. One of the things I noticed is that if you go to one of the old videos or the previous live videos and there's a little drop down on other pages that didn't have that subscribe feature, you could just click right there, subscribe to live videos. You can also usually during a live video just click in the right hand corner, subscribe. It might just be on mobile, if you're watching from your mobile device that you see that. But things are changing so rapidly. Facebook is going to continue to change. Things are going to continue to change. But one way to really be able to have that relationship with your audience and with your viewers is to be able to get them to subscribe, get them to come back, get them to see that more often. I know a lot of people don't feel comfortable on live video. But you know what? There is nothing that gets you faster to know like and trust someone. There's nothing that gets you faster to building that rapport with your audience than video. And it doesn't mean you have to do it all the time. It doesn't mean that you have to do it at all. I mean, you may just have a different strategy that you're using right now. I think Facebook Live is a really great opportunity and the way that they are really focusing on video, it just really shows me that this is going to continue to evolve, continue to have an amazing impact. Another thing that you can do after you finish your Facebook Live video, if you're broadcasting from your business page, you can then run an ad to a specific audience to that video. So, so if you have a video that has really good feedback and just really great information, or it's just fun and engaging, you may want to run an ad specifically to that video to a new audience. So that way you're getting the attention of new people, bringing them into your tribe. And that is an option as well. Everyone has to evaluate this for themselves. You have to know what is going to be best for you. What's going to be the best strategy for your personality, your strengths, your business, your time. Look at the big picture and what's going to be easiest for you. What do you think? Will you just be a participant and watch the videos or will you actually take that step and do a live video? You can do it. It's. It's scary. I mean, I still, like, even today, for some reason I was getting a little bit like, of that feeling of like nervousness and I've been doing video every few days I'm on video. I mean, I've been doing this a lot. It doesn't mean the nervousness will necessarily go away. I just think you have to jump in. I just think you have to do it. If this is something that you know will be good for your business. If you want to increase the engagement and you know you have some value to share, you can do quick videos, you can do quick insights. Go for it and I will see you guys next time.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.