How to Make Your Facebook Live Stream Stand Out

Hundreds of brands have started to incorporate Facebook live streams to reach their audience, but the novelty of the new way to engage and interact with live audiences quickly wore off. However, some businesses have been able to utilize Facebook Live to great success. To optimize your Facebook live stream, you must construct your strategy — content, marketing and social — in a way that satisfies your consumers who are hungry for live content.

In order to avoid projecting your live stream to an empty audience, the following tips will help you get a higher return on your live stream investment and stand out from the noise.

Give Your Audience What They Want

Live stream content would be more successful if the creators better understood their audience's interests. This can be approached in a variety of ways.

Facebook Audience Insights will show you descriptive information such as age ranges and genders. But for the real meat, go to the “Interests” tab to see what interests your audience has outside of your brand. This information can then be leveraged to make your Facebook Live video "surprisingly" aligned with their interests.

For example, you might find that a huge chunk of your audience likes Kung Fu movies, or are interested in a certain influential person such as Tim Ferriss. Using this information, you could theme your live stream with a sort of unique Kung Fu vibe, or use it to apply a notable piece of work by Tim Ferriss to the information you are providing during your live stream.

Promote Before the Live Stream

Instead of hoping that viewers will serendipitously stumble upon your live video and start commenting and liking it, put some effort into promoting the live stream beforehand. In order to do this, your live stream must seem valuable and interesting enough to promote, or it will be met with a lack of enthusiasm.

Some of the most effective ways to promote live streams include:

Network with influencers in your industry who can magnify the reach of your live stream promotion to their own audiences. You could potentially come to an agreement with influencers who have a track record of success with live streams to host the live stream themselves.

Make use of your email list and social networks to create a buzz around the live stream. On the day of, since your email list and social network audiences are already warmed to the idea, it will be much easier to mobilize them to watch it.

Promote the live stream on already existing content, whether that’s editing descriptions, including it in headers, bumpers, popovers.

Choose an Event to Live Stream

Live streams give business owners the opportunity to bring their audience anywhere they go. With this in mind, it doesn’t make much sense to only do live streams from inside your office. In order to really make your live stream stand out, consider going to an event that your audience would be interested in (Reminder that you can learn about your audience's interests using the audience interest discovery tips above).

This not only makes your live stream stand out, it also helps to add an element of excitement and fun to your brand. Instead of coordinating an event something yourself, there are hundreds of exciting events all over the world every year that would make for an excellent live stream. The goal of this specific live stream is to break the routine of what people expect to see on their newsfeed.

Some great ideas for a live stream event include:

Conferences: Events like South By Southwest bring in thousands of business owners, musicians, and artists from around the world. This provides an excellent opportunity to showcase some of the more exciting elements of the conferences exclusively to your live audience.

Sports events: While you may not be able to relay an extraordinary amount of information during a sports event, games are an excellent way to show the fun personality of your brand. If you’re a business with ties to a specific region, bringing your audience to an exciting local sports event helps to substantially increase local viewership.

New Product Releases: Imagine being able to see a handful of the coolest products at the Consumer Electronics Show without having to visit Las Vegas. For the average person scrolling through their newsfeed, a new product release is enough to keep their attention for at least a few minutes.

Take advantage of the amazing events happening all throughout the year and give your audience the experience from the comfort of their own newsfeed.

Interact with Your Audience

A one-sided conference doesn’t really give people a reason to watch it and share it as it is happening. By interacting with your audience during the live stream, you will be able to keep them engaged and hanging around longer.

While the occasional “Hey, Jeremy, glad to hear you like the stream” doesn’t hurt, it could get a bit repetitive. This is why it is important to build a sense of interaction into the live stream. For example, if you want to keep a two-way interaction with your audience, consider hosting an “Ask Me Anything” or “AMA” with someone of interest, or a live chat during a live stream if appropriate.

Final Thoughts

A great live stream goes far beyond what the average company is doing today. In order to continue to give viewers a reason to stick around and get excited for your next live streams, you must provide and create a tremendous amount of value for them.

Live streams can be an incredibly valuable way to engage your audience. While you should have a clear plan and goal for the stream, it is equally important to have fun and show your audience that behind your brand is a human being and not just another digital marketing campaign.

To check out more tips of how to make your video content work better for you, set up a Zype demo today.