Facebook Live - Why You Need To Use It Now & How To Get The Biggest Results For Your Business

Tribefit.co's Chris Lynton whiteboard video explaining why Facebook Live is such a powerful tool to use in your business right now and how to get the best results with Facebook Live.

Hi there my name is Chris Lynton from Tribefit.co. Today I'm gonna talk to you about something very special, very exciting. That is Facebook Live. Facebook Live is a feature within Facebook, which has been released, rolled out within Australia, New Zealand in the last couple of weeks. It's something very exciting. A lot of people aren't utilising it to it's biggest potential. So, first of all, a bit of a background, if you haven’t used Facebook Live yet, it's available if you have the Facebook app on your phone. If you go on the app to Facebook, you see is a new icon. If you go into Facebook when you find, for example, on a web browser, it doesn’t exist. So you need to download the app. Make sure you're going through the app. You'll see the icon there and we recommend using it very, very quickly on to it. And these are the reasons why.

A bit of a background on Facebook Live, of why it’s so popular at the moment. If you rewind a couple of years ago, Facebook was having a bit of a bout with Google, who owns YouTube. YouTube was the number one video platform in terms of social media. Facebook saw that and they wanted to start to steal traffic users away from YouTube and as a result, Facebook made video a very, very big thing. And as a result, Facebook video platform is now being used a lot more than YouTube and they've done what they needed to do.

It used to be the most powerful social media content, posting on Facebook video versus still pictures etc. But what I'm gonna talk to you about now is Facebook Live and what's even more powerful. Facebook is currently going in a battle versus Snapchat. Snapchat, most of you probably know what it is, it's a live video social media platform. Facebook saw the trend, seeing people moving to this live platform format and wanting to not lose users away from Facebook to Snapchat, for example, they also wanting to block users from leaving them to go to Snapchat to use it live. One on one more relationships style communication platform with the same time, they also wanted to show up within Facebook so they can steal people away from Snapchat back into Facebook platform.

The number one goal of Facebook is that more users, more people in there as long as possible because they’re obviously taking some advertising and that's how they make money. So they've seen the huge trend in Snapchat, people wanting this live communication social platforms. So as a result, some of them, they’ve been working on quite some time. They tested it with larger accounts, are all around the world and now have rolled it out completely after they've wind down out all the bumps and have with issues with the larger accounts or more celebrity-based people are the people we'd worked with. We saw the bumps that happened but now they've winded out and opened up for the rest of us.

Why it's important, the battle between Facebook and Snapchat. Facebook, as I mentioned, wants to pull people away from Snapchat. So what they're doing is they're trying to incentivise people to fill their feed with live content. So what they're doing, all the testing we've been doing under the past month or two, video used to be the most powerful in terms of getting the most reach on Facebook for your posts.

Live, with the exact same stuff, with the exact same workload and etc. We're getting about three to four times the reach with Facebook Live posts versus videos. So, one example, one client we're working with, usually gets around a hundred thousand reach and that's organically before advertising starts on video content. They're sitting between three hundred to four hundred thousand reach on Live which is huge, absolutely massive. Their engagement's going up. Their reach is going up. They're reaching more, new, fresh eyeballs and as a result, their sales are going up and also, their page is growing. They used to grow at about fifteen hundred, one thousand five hundred story per week of followers. And just these last two weeks is going up to about four thousand organically new followers per week. It's all to do with the increased reach, all to do with the increased engagement which is helping the Facebook algorithm and they're also seeing more sales as well as a result of that which is important.

So, first and foremost, get on to it because it's the largest, biggest bank for you to buck content at the moment for Facebook and I guess the next one is how best to use it to get the most out of when you're doing your Live.

The first point is timing. Live is all about doing it live, getting engagement live and communicating with people. One on one, lucky you've got or one on relationship, a friend communication platform that people really buy into. They're doing that live. So, if you're doing it in a time when no one's on Facebook, you're not gonna be able to have anyone communicate with you. You're not gonna have any engagement and when you do a live post, or any live content, you're gonna go, 'Oh, it isn't working for me.' What you need to do is going to a Facebook account, click on the insights, find out when your following is online and live for most people, that would be around 7 to 8 am, midday this is fine and generally for everyone, it's around 8 or 9 pm - the largest spike of all. So make sure you do it at the right time because what you're looking to do is communicate with people, get them to Live, engage back with you and then you continue that conversation with them and that will magnetize all their friends to it, increase your reach, increase your communication, grow your brand and as a result, pull through a custom of clients, etc., etc. So timing. Go into Facebook insights. Make sure you do that.

In terms of what's the best format. Talk about that in two ways. Q & A. Q & A is by far the biggest thing you can do on Facebook Live. You gotta ask questions. You gotta get engagement. You gotta start a conversation. So ask a simple question, get people to comment that and then respond to the points that they make. Ask them a question again when you're responding and get them just communicating with you. Create as much of the conversation with as many people as possible and that's the way, that snowball effect.

The other part is format is how long most people ask. All the testing we've done, if you do it from about two to five minutes long, it's not gonna be any good. The optimum time so far we've seen is 20 to 60 minutes. The reason being is you get to have that snowball effect live. It's not good enough to have a lot of component and think it's gonna grow and reach thereafter. It's all about trying to attract as many people right there and then. Engage them and then maybe their friend might come in in 5 or 10 minutes after that person first started and it just snowballs and snowballs and snowballs. That's how you're getting this number of reaches. So twenty to sixty minutes is the ideal. Do what you can. I've already seen it from a testing 20 to 60 minutes is the ideal. If you're doing that, as an example, at around a peak or say, 8 pm, 8 pm to 9 pm, fantastic.

The other thing you can do to help is to post about it in the lead up to the live campaign or you're Live content and let people know that it's coming. You don't have to do this but it's one way to make sure you get more people on there. If you can get, say, 50 to a 100 people there one time all having a conversation with you, it will go nuts. You better communicate with them. Get them to engage and then all of their friends will be magnetised to it so make sure, you do that in terms of the lead-up, lead-up posts across any of your social platforms and also just trying to get behind and trying to get as many people there and getting ready for it. But it's not absolutely necessary.

Timing, format and in terms of how to bring it back to your landing page and make sure you're not just having conversations but you're building a relationship and then try to send them to where you want to send them in terms of keeping them value or supplying them with a product that will solve their problem. It's a soft sell.

This platform is not about a hard sell. Live is about building trust, a relationship, a conversation. But if you soft sell right, what you'll see is not only to get huge amounts of reach, you get huge amounts of spot and web traffic, inquiries, etc., etc. So your use is powerful. We recommend every two to five minutes within there somehow try to soft sell them something that you're doing, whatever is the product or the service and you also have to mention a way for people to be able to contact you, a way to go after that. If you say, ‘How to get my program, look what I'm eating today, this is a recipe or is a workout or whatnot.’ You want to soft sell in terms of, ‘If you love this, If you test, fantastic.’ ‘You're looking for more? Make sure you check out my product XYZ.’ But you have to tell them where to go. If they don't know where to go, they might think, ‘Great. That's fantastic. I really want it.' But if you leave to them to think how to find it, you already lost them. It's all about making it very easy and giving a singular direction in terms of going through your landing pages, your websites, etc. The best way to do it, one way is obviously talking about it through audio but by far the best way to doing it is commenting in your comments in terms of saying, ‘Oh, I'll drop the link in right here. Everybody click on that, who's interested. And it will go straight through.’ That makes it the most easiest and bulletproof format.

So, soft sell. Don't do a hard sell. Length: 20 to 60 minutes ideal. Timing; go into Facebook insights. Find when your community is most aligned. Make sure you're doing it in that time and in terms of the reach, you will get massive amounts of reach, massive amounts of engagement. And if you're doing the soft sell right, you'll see people coming through to whether it be your sales page or product page where you ask them to email you or pm you, whatever your format is in terms of closing or trying to send them to where you wanna send them. Make sure you do that. I've had people that haven't mentioned that and they've had Facebook Live going nuts but not really have any increase in sales, website traffic, etc., etc. Make sure you give the direction of where to go. So Facebook Live, if you haven't done it yet, make sure you give it a go this week.

Get on it before the algorithms change through the top, three to four times of reach, any other content in terms of video and stills, generally one or two times reduced from video. So very, very powerful.

If you haven't used it yet, make sure you get on to it today, if not, this week. And I'll be speaking to you soon. Bye for now.