Facebook Live

Facebook Live for business

Facebook Live – the benefits of broadcasting your business

The most recent development on Facebook, ‘Facebook Live’, is opening a whole new world of opportunities for businesses to engage with their followers. If you’ve got no idea what Facebook Live is think of it as a live video broadcast. These videos are posted directly to your Facebook page in real-time (almost) – be that your private page or your business page. Like any other Facebook posting, these can be liked and shared by your page followers – and as the administrator you can add tags and adjust privacies to help you get your broadcast to those you want it seen by.

Live, and not so Live

Obviously, your followers aren’t all just sitting on your Facebook page waiting for stuff to be posted – as nice at that would be! To cater for these absentees, once your live event has ended the video is then shown along with your other postings for people to view as and when. Over time your viewing number will rise as more people watch it, like it, comment and share it on their own Facebook wall.

Hopefully you can start to see how this kind of marketing tool could benefit your business and help you to generate social media followers. But what kind of things to people want to see? The answer seems to be pretty much anything! The most viewed Facebook Live is currently “Chewbacca Mom”. (CLICK HERE – and try not to laugh) To date, this has had 166 million views since it first appeared as a Facebook Live. At the time of going live it maybe had only one or two (or none more likely) viewers – but the Facebook Live experience is about sharing things as they happen.

This is obviously not an example of a business using Facebook Live. But what this example should do for you is to demonstrate the potential of Facebook Live. I’m sure you can also imagine the effect this had on the sales of Chewbacca-type masks!

Think business!

Shrewd businesses are now tapping into this by using Facebook Live to share all kinds of real-time events. The obvious ones are things such as product launches, conferences, exhibition stand tours, product training sessions… or any other event where you would naturally have a live audience. Facebook Live will enable more people to experience these and, more importantly, share their experience with others who might find your content of interest.

Whilst spontaneity is at the heart and soul of this technology, pre-publicising your event will enable you to increase real-time viewers who can engage with you at the time of broadcast. You can actively encourage questions from your viewers at the time and gain valuable feedback – as well as spreading the word about your broadcast and generally scattering your brand amongst their friends and followers too. The only real limitation is that your event can’t be more than 4-hrs long as a single stream.

How to Facebook Live – The basics

In its simplest form, a Facebook Live event can be created using just your mobile phone and the Facebook App. The only other requisite is an uninterrupted and reasonably broad-bandwidth mobile or Wifi connection.

If you want to post something to your private page, simply click the Live button and add the event details as requested. Within a few moments your phone will start sharing its Facebook Live buttonpictures and sound to your Facebook wall. (as demonstrated by Chewbacca). It’s a little less obvious on a business page, but still possible. In this instance, go to your business page, click the ‘Post’ button, and then select the ‘Live’ option.

The drawbacks of using your phone for a Facebook Live event are mainly down to the limitations your phone’s camera. Whilst the picture quality on most modern phones is perfectly adequate, the sound from the internal microphone is generally poor. This can be easily overcome with the addition of an external microphone.  But you’ll still be limited to the basic camera controls offered on your phone. This might be fine for a talking-head type situation, but if your ambitions are greater then you’re going to have to look at more advanced options.

As a business you might want to broadcast something a little more akin to a real TV broadcast.  This could include nice lighting, proper audio, autocue and possibly multi-camera coverage of your event. This is where you’ll need the services of a company such as Video Artisan.  You’ll also need some additional hardware to connect the output from a video camera or mixer and spit this out to Facebook.

How to Facebook Live – Advanced

For a single-camera broadcast our JVC cameras have the ability to send their output to the Internet through a WIFI, 3/4G or LAN dongle. They also enable us to assign the required values that will let Facebook see the camera’s output and broadcast it.

These settings are accessed within your Facebook business page. Within ‘Publishing Tools’ you’ll find ‘Video Library’ and the facility to set up a ‘Live’ event. This is where you give Facebook your camera’s location details as well as setting up other parameters to help you reach your audience. Our initial testing here at Video Artisan resulted in this little masterpiece – click here.

Another box of tricks is needed for multi-camera events.  This mixes the camera feeds and then encodes the signal into something Facebook-friendly. Using this configuration, the only limits to your Facebook Live event are your imagination and your budget!

Let’s go live!

If you’d like to talk about your Facebook broadcasting ambitions, please give us a call now. Before you know it, you could be the very next Facebook Live sensation! Call Kevin Cook on +44 (0) 3602 3356 or email kevin@video-artisan.com

A guide to Conference Video

Conference Video Title
A quick guide to the benefits of commissioning a conference video

Thinking about a conference video?

With conference season about to kick off in earnest there will be many organisers still pondering on the thought of recording the event on video. I mean, it’s a whole lot of hassle isn’t it? Well no it isn’t actually. Producing a conference video can be the simplest of things to do and comes with range of benefits for the organisers, the speakers and the delegates – not to mention those people who were not able to attend!

A conference video can be anything from a single-camera production with basic intro/outro graphics and then shared online either publicly or privately to a selected audience – right through to a multi-camera extravaganza, with live external feeds to stage, post-event interviews with keynote speakers and so on, and so on. If your event is only weeks away your ambitions are probably going to be quite modest, but to let the opportunity of capturing something of the event slip by might be regretted. Reject having a conference video at your haste – repent at your leisure!

The benefits of commissioning a conference video

OK, at a very basic level, video is a great way to record an event for archiving or keeping a record of what has been said. It might not ever be used in any other way, but even at this level there’s great value in recording on video what we do. They are historic documents and could at some stage in the future be extremely valuable in illustrating a period in time or development of your business.

However, the real value to all concerned is to look to create a video record to be shared and used – and possibly create additional revenue for the organisers. You’ve probably invested considerable time and resources into the venue, speakers and general event management so you’ll certainly want to explore every possible revenue stream in order to make the event more profitable. Post-event conference video sales to attendees and non-attendees can be a very lucrative thing to offer. Password-protected and secure online video delivery is reasonably straight forward these days – or you could simply revert to DVD release to add more value.

Filming a Team Building Event lighting
The stage is set for another conference video

Producing a conference video might also help you to attract sponsors – certainly if their brand is going to be exposed to a broader online community. A properly indexed and tagged video hosted on YouTube or Vimeo will get to the right audience and, at the same time, help with your own search engine optimisation and online presence. You might find that a sponsor covers all the costs of production and distribution and the content is provided freely to anyone who wants to see it.

If your next event is just one of many then you’ll no doubt understand how useful a promotional video can be in selling your next event, and it doesn’t take much planning and imagination for a good video production company to have this in mind whilst shooting for a standard long-form conference video. Over time, with a number of events recorded, you could have a promotional video which reflects your history and expertise more accurately – updated periodically to keep it fresh and relevant.

For little more investment you could also consider transmitting your conference live (almost) over the internet as a webcast. In it’s most basic form there are ways to do this freely, but there’s all manner of webcasting tools available to you today to make the whole experience more interactive and audience-focussed. For instance, you could allow online delegates to post questions to speakers or panel members and engage “live”.

Conference video costs

There’s no logical way to menu-price a conference video service, but at the very basic end of the scale you could get your event professionally recorded for a few hundred pounds. In addition, tidying up the output and putting it into an online-ready format for distribution might only take a day to do – and perhaps just a little more investment post production could result in really useful promotional tool for your future events or purely to share with those involved.

If your ambitions are beyond the basic level then it’s going to take a little more effort in preparing a detailed proposal – which should also give you some further ideas on how you can start to benefit from commissioning a conference video. Either way, please contact us today if we’ve raised your interest enough to commission a conference video. Please call 020 3602 3356.

Note: Here’s a selection of case studies based on conference video and event coverage …

Case Study 1
Case Study 2
Case Study 3
Case Study 4

More medical conference filming

I was conference filming for Dilip Patel of Double-Barrelled again at the weekend.  It’s always a pleasure working with Dilip – but I found myself sucked in by the subject matter more than ever this time.

The event was being run by the Merseyside Family Doctors Association at the Lace Conference Centre in Liverpool.  We wasn’t covering the whole event but rather concentrating on capturing a keynote presentation by Prof. George Freeman and Dr. Alison Hill entitled ‘Continuity of Care’.  We were also to film a short interview with them both following their presentation in one of the breakout rooms at the venue – with questions being put to them by the lovely Bryony Wolfendale.  Dilip was also filming other pieces to camera with Bryony to introduce the event and top-n-tail the video.

Conference filming in Liverpool
Working with Dilip and Bryony was a pleasure

As I was only providing a Canon 5D Mkii and tripod (as an emergency back up and to catch some cutaways) it seemed wasteful for me to drive all the way of from Loughton, Essex to Liverpool – so I found myself once again catching an early train from Euston.  I was at Lime Street station by 9:20 and at the venue about 15-mins later.  If it hadn’t been for a little London Underground “experience” first thing it would have been a completely stress-free conference filming experience.  But hey ho – by the time I arrived I was suitably snoozed and ready to capture some great footage.

The main presentation was filmed using two Canon XF105s which were on hire from the ever-so reliable Hireacamera.  Dilip and I had used these super-simple cameras on the Cardiff job earlier this year and their performance then suggested they’d be perfect for this job. This time it was an even simpler set up with each camera recording in isolation and Dilip cutting the footage in post.  There were also two additional cameras recording the action in the main hall – both 5D Mkii’s (mine and Dilip’s).  One was capturing a very wide shot from the back and the other was capturing a shot from behind the speaker looking out to the audience.

Conference Filming at the Family Doctors Association
Conference filming a reverse shot to give Dilip something to help him “cross the line”

The subject matter of the presentation by Prof. George Freeman and Dr. Alison Hill was really about explaining the benefits of, and encouraging GPs to provide, continuity of care to patients.  They also revealed how they are trying to educate government on the benefits of this approach and getting it adopted on a much wider basis.  Whilst continuity of care is achieved through many different techniques and approaches, the issues that I could relate to were that patients like to see the same GP (or at least someone from a small team of GPs) who appears familiar with them and their medical history.  The session outline some simple ways to make patients feel like they are more than just a medical record on a computer – and went on to explain how this approach can benefit patient health, the workload of the GP and the healthcare in general.  It was extremely encouraging to listen in on.

Whilst my mind was firmly on my conference filming brief, it was great to be involved in something that was relatively easy to understand.  More often than not these medical conferences are very specialised and therefore hard to follow.  Sometimes it’s as if they are being delivered in a foreign language!

With the interviews complete, and Bryony’s reverse questions, glances and noddies all in the can, I was back at Lime Street station to catch the 15:48 back down to London Euston.  I was back in Loughton by 18:45 so not much different from a normal day at the office.

Looking forward to the next one Dilip! : )