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A Marketer’s Guide to Launching a Facebook Live Campaign

Mar 24, 2020

By Natalie Boyd

We’ve all had the notifications pop up on our phones when a friend decides to share a moment in real time—but is your brand utilizing Facebook Live to its full marketing potential to stand out in the noisy digital space? Whether your business is B2B or B2C, there is a multitude of potential with Facebook Live.

What Is Facebook Live?

Facebook Live is exactly what it sounds like—it’s a feature on Facebook that allows you to live-stream videos on your Facebook page and engage with your followers in real time. Facebook launched the Live feature in 2016 to stay competitive with Periscope and YouTube and other platforms where users can go live. Facebook has been taking great strides to help marketers be successful on the platform—consistently rolling out new features to help you spread your message even further.

Facebook’s goal is to keep people on the Facebook platform. It wants people to utilize video there and stay engaged. Knowing that Facebook is putting so much weight behind this platform presents a big opportunity for brands. Facebook is going to build that real-time audience for you with people that are already following your page, and it’s going to go that extra mile for you to make sure you’re grabbing people’s attention.

Why Is Facebook Live Good for Business?

People like interactive content; they like to engage directly with brands. They like to know that their voice is heard, and they want to be able to ask questions and get back-and-forth engagement. After all, that’s how we create relationships.

With Facebook Live, businesses have the ability to create authentic, relevant content that shows the people behind their brands, rather than the cold, sterile advertisements of the past.

Another reason why Facebook Live is good for business is because you can reuse the video in different ways. You can take the audio portion and use it as a podcast. You can take stills of the video and make a blog post or a blog series. You can create an email campaign. You can also use the video as a boosted paid opportunity, get more views, and continue to grow your audience. As you can see, you can repurpose that content and have it continue to work for you even after you’ve gone live.

Is Facebook Live for B2C or B2B?

Facebook is both a B2C and a B2B platform. There are different ways you could use Facebook Live to be successful.

For B2C, you might want to think about event marketing if you have a particular event going on, or you could go behind the scenes to announce a new product. Newsjacking works well for B2C and any national occasions. For example, say you are a food brand, like Whole Foods, and Mother’s Day is coming up. You could share some Facebook Live videos of how you use recipes with ingredients at your store.

Planning Your Facebook Live

Just like with any other event, you need to have a game plan and answer these questions:

  • What are you going to talk about?
  • What is the goal of this event?
  • What is your call to action after the video?

You’ll need to draft a basic script, know exactly what you’re going to say. You don’t need to write out specific lines, but you should have an agenda and know what’s going to happen. A lot of people will just go live, but it’s hard to be live for at least five minutes when you don’t know what you’re going to talk about.

How to Schedule a Facebook Live

You have the option to schedule your event so your followers will receive a reminder notification. Take the following steps to schedule your event:

  1. On your home tab, click on “Live” 
  2. Click “Schedule a Live Video”
  3. Choose a date and time
  4. Add a title and a description for your broadcast (Make it compelling and tell your audience exactly what they’re going to get out of your broadcast.) 
  5. Add an image
  6. Review your settings
  7. Click “Schedule Live Video”

Once everything is scheduled, you’ll see the reminder come up on your Facebook page that you plan to go live. 

About 10 minutes before you’re scheduled to start, you and your audience can sit and talk to each other while they wait for you to officially go live. 

Marketing Your Facebook Live

Now you need to market your event. Put some effort behind it. Don’t just go live for the sake of going live. Tell your audience what they’ll get out of this experience. Post on social media at least two weeks before the event across all of your social platforms. 

Send at least one email and a reminder the day before. You can also send a promotional email and share with your audience what they’re going to get out of the Facebook event. Be sure to include a calendar invite with a link to your Facebook page because they will not get a link like they do with a webinar. You can also do a countdown to the event on Facebook before you go live. We like to do one about every two hours to build excitement. 

Boosting a Facebook post is recommended, but you cannot boost the scheduled reminder. You cannot boost anything until after your broadcast ends. However, you can boost a post that links to that reminder or talks about your upcoming live event.