Facebook LIVE for marketing

I was recently involved in crowdfunding a UK feature documentary Killing The Law. Although our primary focus was to market the film on Twitter due to better organic reach and possibility to reach out to different communities, we did some work on Facebook too.

I have a few issues with Facebook as a marketing tool. Firstly building a following for a page is slow and difficult and even when created, one needs to pay to reach those followers. The organic views are actually so low, that the whole purpose of a page becomes pointless if there is no budget to promote it.

Secondly, to avoid spamming, Facebook has set rules so that one can not invite people that one doesn't know to like a page, fare enough! There problem though is that in addition to this, if I manage our Facebook page, I can not then invite all the people who like that page to out event, but only the ones that I personally know from the 'likers'. That is actually a problem! We use a lot of time to build an audience to either our film or product and if we are lucky it we might see the audience grow and get a lot of followers for the page, that we do not know personally. That is great! But then once we want to invite them to, let's say a premiere, that is not possible.

I found a loophole to all of this through LIVE streaming, a relatively new Facebook feature that has nevertheless being used loads by stars and marketeers in promotion of new titles, including La La Land's star PR via Facebook LIVE.

When a friend or a page you follow goes live and stays live for long enough you get a notification about them being live if you are online at the time. In addition, research shows that people are more likely to like, comment and share live content.

We did one key live broadcast with Killing The Law from a candlelit vigil in front of the Supreme Court in December 2016. That was a good way for us to involve our supporters into the world of the documentary and show the protesters in the heart of the film in action. Naturally we were able to include a call to action from the campaigners themselves to encourage people to donate to our crowdfunding campaign and follow the filmmaking process.

According to study about live videos in social media, they seems to work best for content that is either newsworthy (like an announcement), exclusive (behind the scenes action, or like in Killing The Law's case an exclusive look at the grass roots campaign in action) or content that requires live action involvement (such as Q&As).

After the broadcast, live content can then be repurposed to be further used. With Killing The Law we cut the live interviews, many of which had a lot of emotion, in to small segments that we were able to publish on Twitter.

This article on Convince & Convert outlines a few ways that live broadcasting can be used to connect with customers and audiences.

Moving forward, I would like to explore with better quality cameras for the live and do sit down Q&As with a film's talent.