From the archive. First published in December 2015. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
Facebook began experimenting with live streaming in 2015, initially for public figures before opening it to everyone. At the time it was one of several streaming products competing for attention.
Where it ended up
Live video is, on the best available measurement, the strongest format on Facebook. Emplifi’s analysis across more than 200,000 Facebook profiles found live video earning a median of 37.5 interactions per post, roughly four times link posts and over six times image posts. Every other format clusters far below.
It is also the format almost nobody in this industry recommends, which is worth thinking about. Advice tends to favour tactics that can be scheduled, batched and outsourced. Live cannot be any of those.
Why it works
Live satisfies nearly every signal the ranking system rewards at once: watch time, comments arriving during the broadcast, shares while it is happening, and genuine responsiveness between the page and its audience. It also benefits from a notification to followers, which almost no other format does.
How to do it without it being painful
- Announce it a day ahead. Live distribution rewards people arriving while you are on air.
- Have one subject and a reason to be there. “Ask me anything” with nobody asking is a long twenty minutes.
- Answer comments out loud as they come in. That exchange is the whole mechanism.
- Keep the recording. It continues to earn views afterwards.
- Twenty focused minutes beats an hour of drift.
For anyone buying a page
A page with a live video history and an audience that reliably turns up is worth meaningfully more than a page of the same size posting reposted images. It is hard evidence of a real audience, and it is difficult to fake. Note that streaming pre-recorded video as live, a tactic that circulated in 2016, is both detectable and against current policy.
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