Facebook Live Video is big. Video can make you money and help you grow your brand. It can can help you build entire audience segments piggybacking off of Facebook’s data. Plus, it engages like nothing else, and it keeps your audiences engaged.
After all, engagement is what you want as a business; and your customers want a way to interact with brands and businesses they like (read: you) as well.
As such, video (and especially live video) makes for a very strong and promising channel for all of us who have anything to do with marketing.
Facebook Live Video is already being hailed as the New QVC.
Ever since Facebook launched Live video in 2016, the use cases for the new and shiny (but certainly promising) feature have only been growing.
Impossible it might seem, but there are people selling fuzzy blankets, vintage clothing, collectibles, and even pearls.
But then, as always, it’s not just the selling that happens on Facebook Live Video. Depending on hosts, audiences, and the businesses or brands, there’s real-time chatting about everything under the sun — from relationships to technology; from food to therapy.
There’s a strong reason why live video (Facebook or not) works: You put your face up in public. It’s the next best thing to being there with your audience, in person. People trust you more when they see you, hear you, and when your personality comes through.
Here are some creative ways you can use Facebook Live Video for Marketing:
Note: You don’t need much to do Facebook Live Videos. They are instant, live, and they need almost no resources when you are just starting out. Just a smartphone will do. You don’t need studio level video production for Facebook Live Videos.
Present Content In a New Avatar
Chances are that you are already creating content. You could be doing content curation, blogging regularly, or you are active on social media.
Facebook live videos are a great way to repurpose the content that you already create for your ideal customer avatar.
However, instead of depending on the static nature of text, images, and infographics, you can start presenting your ideas, insights, tips, and other content through Live Videos.
Doing live videos or live streams regularly, just as you produce content regularly, brings you all the benefits content marketing does:
- You’ll grow your audience
- You can embed calls to action in your content to generate leads
- You’ll build your status as an influencer or thought leader.
With live video, however, you are taking this several levels up.
Here’s how Martha Stewart shares how-tos, tips, ideas, and DIY recipes.
Live Video => Live Tutorials or Webinars
Webinars are still a great way to generate leads by sharing information or knowledge. Webinars, by definition, are time bound since subscribers have to keep track of the time and date and then ensure that they show up, unless you’re doing an automated webinar that starts multiple times a day like we talk about in the Convert book…
Scriptly’s Webinar Wizard can help you whip up a webinar in no time.
Want to see how a Webinar Sales Funnel can increase your conversion? Be sure to check out the Attract. Engage. Profit. Workshop!)
Live Videos and Live Streams help you take webinars up a notch by bonding with your audience first and pre-framing the content of the webinar. Not to mention, they can be boosted and you can build an audience based on how much of the Live Video a person watches!
What does that mean? Well, if someone watches 50% of your Live Video, you better believe they’re a lot more interested than someone who watches just 10 seconds! You can serve up retargeting ads to the people who haven’t registered yet!
Take Live Q & A
If you have a business, chances are that your potential customers have many questions on topics that relate to your products, services and expertise. Facebook Live Videos are a great way to immediately engage and answer questions your audiences might have — about anything related to your business niche.
Live Question & Answer events literally place you right in the middle of your audience and make them feel that you are real, that you know your stuff, and allows them to ease up a little to give them a sense of community.
Not to mention, you get immediate social proof. Most likely, they aren’t the only ones attending the Live Stream. Conversations ensue through the chat box and you’re seen as the expert in your field.
Got Events? Go live With Them
Starbucks, for instance, did their first live event at Rufus King Park in Jamaica, Queens, NY for National Voter Registration Day.
The event helped show their involvement with a local community along with providing a platform for Starbucks — along with Howard Schultz and others — to educate people on voting.
Talk show? Anyone?
You know podcasts are popular. Pretty soon, Audiobooks will also be the preferred medium for reading (thanks to Amazon’s Alexa?).
The best thing to happen (and you don’t need to be Amazon for this) is to use Facebook Live Video for hosting your own talk shows.
Refinery29 is an online fashion and lifestyle publisher. They host a Facebook live video talk show called “The Mention” discussing all things fashion, lifestyle, trends, and more.
You could run the talk show all by yourself where you can talk about a topic or share ideas about something and throw the floor open for others to chime in. Or, you could invite other influencers (guests) related to your business or the topic you want to address and have them go live with you.
Live talk shows can help your audience ease in without pressure, engage, talk, share ideas, and get closer to your brand than you’d ever be able to without Live videos.
Not to mention, you can export those Facebook Live Streams as an .mp4 file, sending them to iTunes and the other podcast directories so your subscribers get to see them too!
Building Your Audience
At the end of the day, Facebook Live Videos and Live Streams help you get in front of your audience, building engagement and segmenting prospects based on how interested they are in what you do. For a lot of our DFY clients who don’t have website traffic, aren’t building an email list yet or who don’t have an audience, we start out with Facebook Live Videos which gives them a jumpstart on building engagement.
Then, we show a retargeted ad to folks who say, watch more than 25% of a video, giving them good data to start building on top of.
There are LOTS of ways to use FB Live Video though. What’s important is that you start. Once you start, all that data stays in your account and there’s all kinds of interesting things you can do with it in the future!
If you’d like to talk about it in more detail, make sure to book an Action Plan call and we’ll figure out how to apply it to your business!
