My first memory of the perils resulting from live TV was a baby elephant called Lulu taking a dump on the studio floor of the BBC during a live showing of Blue Peter, Britain’s top childrens show. Lulu then pulled her zoo keeper through the mess, smearing it across the floor as Peter Purvis tried to keep talking and not burst out in laughter.
They played that over and over again. I even had a collage of photos documenting the incident in a Christmas album.
THE DANGER OF LIVE CAN BE GREATER THAN THE REWARDS
In May last year Facebook introduced Mentions, an app that allowed celebrities with a verified Facebook fan page to produce live video, streamed directly to their fans news feeds. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson was first in, completing a thrilling 5 mins from the premier of his new movie.
In December 2015 Facebook began to roll out the live feature on the app for all people, products, organizations and brands. Here in Puerto Rico, mine was activated on Sunday 28th February. I drank water from a straw live (and in HD)! That’s all I could think of doing at the time.
ONE OF THE BIGGEST DANGERS OF GOING LIVE IS BEING BORING
At Gustazos.com we have been live for a couple of weeks now. We made the content about new deals, giving deeper insight to the offers and their key features. By showing the real-time Google Analytics screen we drew attention to being live and gave a peek of our internal data. Not sure how exciting it is for people to know that a 1,000 other people are on the site, but if you’re in a shop with 1,000 people Im sure you’d think that there must be something cool to buy there.
When you’re live the viewer has the opportunity to subscribe to your channel and the next live feeds. This is another great way to build your digital audience. Once subscribed they will receive an instant notification when you go live.
Audience retention for the entire feed is almost zero, but an average view duration of 43 seconds, is much more than the average for pre-recored video.
Here is what we have learned…
- Plan and prepare for the shoot
- Don’t over plan and don’t over prepare for the shoot (just do it!)
- Use an iPhone 6 or better
- Make sure the signal is strong
- Buy a microphone, light and a stabilizer to hold the phone
- Be live for 5 mins minimum, to let the audience grow
- Start slowly and build up as the first 10 seconds will have no viewers
- Give value to each show
- Avoid baby elephants (a lesson learned in 1969)
- Go live now and build an audience early!
The reach is high, the rewards are instant and its exciting.
If you want to learn more about our live results please email us at [email protected]
