It’s #MarketingWednesday, so today we’re going to talk about how to use Facebook Live in your marketing plan.

The statistics are incredible for Facebook Live; you are so much more likely to be seen. Facebook favors it, especially with the new algorithms they’re putting out. Their whole purpose with the redos on Facebook is to better encourage community, and Facebook Live encourages community – it’s right in the moment.

Identify Your Target Audience

What does your ideal client look like? Who are you trying to target? Once you have an idea of who your client is, it’s going to help give you a focus for your Live. Knowing who you’re talking to helps you establish a plan to not only create content, but to actually reach that client as well. 

Understand You Goal

Going Live is not necessarily an easy thing. It takes planning, it takes consistency, it takes a certain kind of personality that isn’t afraid in front of a camera. So it’s important that you have an objective for your Live. Are you trying to generate leads? Are you creating top-of-mind awareness? Are you trying to capture emails? Are you selling a product? No matter your goal, I’ll tell you quality over quantity every time. If you have 1,000 views, but only 10 engagements, that’s not good. I’d rather you have 50 views with 10 engaging brand warriors who share your message and really get into what you’re saying.

Define Your Content

Are you filming a tutorial? Is it an interview? It community news? An open house? It’s awesome for people who can’t attend and to get the attention of others. I only attend something if I’m convinced before I go that it’s the right place for me to be. By showing me something on Facebook Live, I could be motivated to go. I’m not saying you have to share every detail, but show a few things you really love about that product or interview or process. You can use it to educate and share tips and just increase your community awareness. What are local shops and restaurants that you love in your area? That’s the kind of stuff people want to know, and Facebook Live is a great way to share it. 

Lay Out Your Production Plan

I’m not talking about two cameras and a green screen. Simpler than that. What time? Which day? It needs to be consistent. You need to make sure your lighting is adequate. You need to make sure you have Internet connection. If you have a third-party app, it needs to be installed. These are small steps, but that continuity really, really helps.

Promote Your Live

Did you schedule your Live? Did you make it an event? Did you announce it on other channels? Have you created a poll about upcoming topics? Announcing and cross-promoting on other channels is a great way to promote your Live. Facebook has its own way of doing things, and they like events. They’ll promote Facebook events more than they will a normal post, so if you announce your Facebook Live as an event, more people will get to see it and more people will come to it. People can also respond to you through the event and ask you questions, so that’s cool too.

Optimize for Replay

A lot of people will film a Live and just leave them, but almost any aspect of a video can be edited to really benefit replay. You can edit your title to make it better, you can edit your tags, you can edit your description, you can edit your thumbnails. You don’t want a bad thumbnail in front of your Live. I have the worst luck with thumbnails. If I’m making a scary face with my mouth open and hands in the air, without a doubt, that’s the thumbnail. So I have to go back and edit my thumbnails. 

Recycle the Content

Yes, it’s awesome that you have video, and that will always be in your video library. But you can also pull quotes from it to create graphics for Instagram, you can pull clips of the video and put them on YouTube if you want, you can use it for sound bites. My team a lot of the times will transcribe my Lives into blog posts. It sounds like my voice, of course, because I’m the one talking, and I know the information is solid because I’ve done my research on the front end. So all they have to do is transcribe and quote the source; it makes great blog content. You can host a watch party. You can embed it into your email marketing. You’re going to get a completely different audience from your email list than you will on Facebook, and it’s just a great way to reuse that content. You can use it as a podcast. You can even boost it if you want to invest a little bit of your Facebook budget into boosting your video so more people will see it and engage with it. Because, again, Facebook plays favorites. The more people who see and engage with the video, the more people they’ll help see and engage with it.

There are so many ways to really boost your marketing plan by using tools that are readily available to you, like Facebook Live.