Facebook has been reported to be testing live events before where they livestreamed a music festival thanks to Place Tips, a feature that uses your location so as to give you information about a certain place. In a new development, they want to give verified profiles the chance to connect to their audiences by broadcasting live.
Live as the name suggest is all about a person with a verified account interacting with his/her followers in real time. This can be used effectively for Q&A sessions or reporting live on a certain event. Facebook also gave out a guide in making these broadcasts lively with the following:
1. Announce when you will start broadcasting. Give it sufficient hype on your page.
2. Give your live broadcast a catchy title before going live
3. Broadcast when your internet connection is strong or else the app will display “Your signal isn’t strong enough to broadcast” that will subsequently lead to the “live” banner being grayed out.
4. Engaging with the fans by responding to their comments and also calling out their names.
5: Broadcasting for longer so as to engage more fans.
6. Creativity matters and also go live frequently.
This feature was opened to select celebrities a while ago, as early as August. In order to use Facebook Live, you need to download Facebook Mentions which is only available on iOS at the moment and log in with your usual credentials to access your verified profile.
By virtue of opening this feature to all verified accounts on Facebook, the networking giant has now gone into direct competition with mainstream networks that offer live-streams like the Twitter owned Periscope, Meerkat and Snapchat too. Facebook has the advantage of having a larger audience than either of the other live-stream services so these public figures with verified accounts may be inclined to use it more. It will be only a matter of time to see how popular this feature will be and the content that will be generated from these live-streams.
