Covering Live events on social media is like catnip for the major social networking sites. Snapchat has Live Stories where they broadcast a variety of snaps from various people in a specific city or event, Twitter has Periscope to broadcast livestreams & hashflags for users to follow specific adverts and now Facebook wants to dip its feet in covering events live by its Live events feature.
Facebook was streaming live the Lollapalooza music festival, which is a concert that features a variety of artistes from various genres that was held in Chicago this past weekend. The stream apparently featured photos from the stage and the concert attendees. Facebook used Place Tips, a feature they introduced early this year which uses your location to give information about a certain place to stream the concert.
A spokesperson who communicated with the Wall Street Journal said that “This Place Tips Lollapalooza experience is just one of the many ways Facebook is trying to help people get the feel of an event when they’re not there“. Facebook also said that these streams on Place Tips differ from the Snapchat ones because users see content from their friends and not curated for all.
Facebook released their Q2 report recently where they announced that they have 968 million daily active users and around 1.5 billion monthly active users. Compare this with Snapchat figures where they have 200 million monthly active users and Twitter has around 320 million monthly active users. If implemented successfully by rolling out to all users worldwide, the livestreams will have a bigger reach on Facebook than the other platforms without even trying too hard. In addition, if Facebook decides to monetize the livestreams, it will boost their incomes if they make those livestreams reliable and properly market them. Snapchat should be worried.
