Video: How to Manage Audience Interactions on Facebook Live
In this excerpt from his presentation at Streaming Media West, Humane Society Managing Director Chad Sisneros describes how his creative and technical team approach Facebook Live webcasts to ensure the audience knows about the event before it happens, is engaged throughout the presentation, and gets its questions answered, and to leverage the organization's 2.5 million-strong Facebook fan base to advance its mission.
Learn more about social media streaming at Streaming Media East.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Chad Sisneros: On Facebook we have 2.5 million fans, so we feel like that's a big enough audience that we want to communicate to them. This is the list that really worked for us, that works for us, that we try to take advantage of every time we do a Facebook Live broadcast. Practice it ahead of time. Block it out, keep it moving. We try to focus on the visuals. Promote it ahead of time, tweet it out, put it on Facebook ahead of time, a couple hours ahead, say, "Hey everybody, look what's coming." Engage live with the audience, that's primarily for Periscope. When somebody joins, that's the good piece of Periscope, you can see, "John Smith just joined." Verbally give them a shout-out.
Whenever I'm on Facebook and somebody says, "Hey Chad, you just joined. Great, hi." That's a great piece of engagement. One of the biggest ones that I can mention for us, engage with commenters, has to do with Facebook. That engagement is really important to us. We go so far as every time we do a Facebook Live we try to figure out what the comments are going to be, what questions are going to come up in the comments, and we come up with a top 10 list of questions that we know we're going to get, and we write out those answers, we work with our experts who know the answers, whether it's a baby raccoon or whatever, we figure out the top 10 lists so then we have somebody else outside of the live stream working to answer those comments during the live stream.
There's comments coming in, I'm shooting it, we've got experts on the scene, we don't have to worry about answering those comments right then. It's too difficult, we're busy shooting it, but somebody else in the office is answering those comments, so responding to the audience immediately is really important for us. It increases that engagement, it tells that audience, "We're listening to you, we want to answer you immediately."
Chad Sisneros: On Facebook we have 2.5 million fans, so we feel like that's a big enough audience that we want to communicate to them. This is the list that really worked for us, that works for us, that we try to take advantage of every time we do a Facebook Live. Practice it ahead of time. I'll show you some examples of this later. Block it out, keep it moving. We try to focus on the visuals. Promote it ahead of time, tweet it out, put it on Facebook ahead of time, a couple hours ahead, say, "Hey everybody, look what's coming." Engage live with the audience, that's primarily for Periscope. When somebody joins, that's the good piece of Periscope, you can see, "John Smith just joined." Verbally give them a shout out.
Whenever I'm on Facebook and somebody says, "Hey Chad, you just joined. Great, hi." That's a great piece of engagement. One of the biggest ones that I can mention for us, engage with commenters, has to do with Facebook. That engagement is really important to us. We go so far as every time we do a Facebook Live we try to figure out what the comments are going to be, what questions are going to come up in the comments, and we come up with a top 10 list of questions that we know we're going to get, and we write out those answers, we work with our experts who know the answers, whether it's a baby raccoon or whatever, we figure out the top 10 lists so then we have somebody else outside of the live stream working to answer those comments during the live stream.
There's comments coming in, I'm shooting it, we've got experts on the scene, we don't have to worry about answering those comments right then. It's too difficult, we're busy shooting it, but somebody else in the office is answering those comments, so responding to the audience immediately is really important for us. It increases that engagement, it tells that audience, "We're listening to you, we want to answer you immediately."
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