Likes Go Live: How to Use Live Video for Your Business

If you are a business owner, having good social media exposure will always come in handy.

Be it Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, social presence is certainly a better determinant of our reach as an entrepreneur. The best strategy, however, would be the manner in which technology mixes with social media, for getting the required bouts of online traction.

Facebook has been pretty active in this regard and added a new string to its bow by adding live streaming to its ever-expanding list of features.

Initially rolled out for celebrities, this service is now available to commoners as well. It’s currently being beta tested on personal accounts, and will be rolled out shortly. Competing against the likes of Meerkat and Twitter-owned Periscope, Facebook has included this technology after multiple speculations and apprehensions.

Related Article: Press Play: The Evolution of Video Marketing

With Live Video Streaming on-board, entrepreneurs can now supercharge their strategies and take their businesses to greater heights.

Initial Roll-Out

It all started with Facebook pulling off the curtains on the Live Video, a feature dedicated to its iPhone app, Mentions. Live streaming can be termed as one of the more exciting features by Facebook, unlike Oculus that did attract a lot of flak.

Once the beta testing was done, Facebook Live became a reality, with a few selected ones getting the privilege of accessing it in the first place.

The availability of Facebook Live is an indication as how social media platforms are moving towards functionality and a greater feeling of human emotion. However, at this juncture, businesses weren’t very hopeful regarding its usage for revamping their strategies, on the whole.

Presently, Facebook Live is available for everybody with iOS, and this presents a greater opportunity of using it for gaining an edge over the competitors.

Related Article: 8 Marketing Trends You Should Know About And How to Use Them

Making the Best Use of Live Video

The entire procedure of accessing this service is simple and detailed. The users must tap the section with news feed on their iPhones, add a message if required and begin broadcasting by tapping’ Go Live’. The broadcast can be terminated on tapping ‘Finish’. This simple yet effective tweak will soon be made available to Android users, therefore enhancing strategic options with immediate effect.

For the business owners, the mentioned procedure already looks lucrative as broadcasting while accessing the social media platform is the best way to initiate online marketing.

Facebook Live now offers us the flexibility of preselecting the audience, making it easier to keep a track of prospective clients and customers. Suppose a product is being manufactured and the customers are looking to get involved with the modus operandi; then Facebook Live is certainly the way to go. 

Unlike Skype, the video-centric interactions will be formal and one can cater to a large number of individuals, at one go. Facebook Live offers us the flexibility of looking at the number of live viewers and if someone leaves mid-way, it is quite easy to determine. For an open broadcast, tuning in is allowed for someone on your priority list; friend-list in the case of Facebook. This is actually synonymous to the website traffic with the only difference being the actual determination of visitors and, therefore, subscribers.

Business will be hugely benefited by another aspect of Facebook Live, the real-time section of streaming comments. Visitors can watch the entire broadcast and comment while viewing the same, forcing entrepreneurs to make constructive changes, in real-time.

We also have the flexibility of disabling comments by selected viewers, with one tap. Businesses are actually well-served by the duration of broadcasts. The 30-minute timeline is the perfect zone for selling a product or a service. Going longer might just kill the excitement. If someone has missed out on the Live Video, watching afterwards is also an option with Facebook Live as we have it saved on our timelines, like any other status update.

Facebook Live has the potential of bridging the emotional gap with our audience.

Surveys suggest that more than 77 percent of Americans have a deeper connect with someone sending personalized messages, rather than texts or emails. More than 66 percent prefer electronic mediums for broadcasting information and news. Facebook Live, therefore has the potential to change the scenario of online marketing, with multiple taps.

Playing the ‘Money Game’

Most companies are planning to put up live sessions with the customers, urging them to comment and interact, via the Facebook Live. Live broadcasting will certainly generate a lot of revenue in years to come. Experts suggest that once the worldwide popularity of Facebook Live is established, the company might start thinking on the lines of monetization. Even today, around 74 percent of B2C marketers make use of videos for most of their marketing efforts. The scenario is similar with about 92 percent of B2B marketers.

According to Cisco, most of the traffic by 2017 will be generated by videos, roughly 74 percent of the total. Again, viewers with live access to products are more likely to make the purchases, around 1.7 times more, in comparison to those visiting websites and reading newsletters.

Collages Make Perfect Allies

Complementing the Facebook Live perfectly are Collages, allowing entrepreneurs to create a proper amalgamation of live videos and photos, mainly as a presentation. These are to be arranged in grids and the age-old scrolling list can now be ditched. The collages have been included as the part of the iOS update for Facebook app and will soon hit the Android shores.

Key Takeaways

These additions happen to be the part of Facebook’s continual progression towards adding rich media and sophisticated tools to its repertoire. Online interactions with the customers are now made easier and the entrepreneurs are now waiting for the Facebook Live to roll onto the Android platform.

Related Article: Don’t Believe the Hype: Why Live Streaming Isn’t For Everyone

This is just the beginning of media interactions and with technology growing in leaps and bounds, another video-centric revolution is certainly on the cards.

Now when the pilot has been a success, the rest of the episodes, associated with the Facebook Live look rather convincing.

So the next time you look at ‘What’s on your Mind’, do remember that you can literally answer it with this new social media tweak.

Likes Go Live: How to Use Live Video for Your Business

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Social Media News Roundup: Prepare to Lose Likes on Facebook

It’s been a busy week for social media marketing news. But fear not – we’ve kept a keen eye on all the latest happenings in the world of social media, from Facebook’s plans to purge Page likes, to the sheer scale of ISIS’s activity on Twitter. Read on for more…

Facebook to Purge Page Likes From Inactive Accounts

Facebook is planning to “[make] Page likes more meaningful” by removing likes from inactive users, the company announced yesterday.

The purge will take place over the coming weeks. We don’t know if the update will happen on a set time or date, or whether likes will gradually be removed over time. Either way, you can expect your Page to lose likes shortly.

Facebook says it’s removing likes to promote consistency, and to help businesses get “up-to-date insights” on users who actively follow their Page.

Likes will be removed from users who have “voluntarily deactivated or memorialised” their accounts. If they decide to re-activate, their Page like will be reinstated.

Twitter Improves Ad Targeting With Partner Audiences

Twitter has improved its ad targeting capabilities with a new venture dubbed ‘partner audiences’.

The feature, which was unveiled yesterday, lets advertisers choose from a list of more than 1,000 audience categories, generated by Twitter’s Marketing Platform Partners.

Source: Twitter Advertising Blog.

Twitter says the new targeting options will help advertisers “drive the highest possible ROI with [their] advertising campaigns”.

From the news release:

…By using a partner to provide the desired audience, an auto brand can connect with audiences that are in-market for a new car. A CPG company can reach customers that have previously purchased products in their category. And luxury brands can limit campaigns to shoppers who earn a household income above a certain threshold.

Partner audiences can also be excluded from advertising campaigns, and can be combined with look-alike targeting to help ads reach a wider audience based on users’ interests.

Twitter says early tests have helped Nestle improve engagement for one of its campaigns by 52%, compared to the brand’s overall performance last year.

Pinterest Also Planning to Boost Ad Targeting Options

Just a day before Twitter announced its partner audiences feature, news broke of Pinterest’s plans to refine its own ad targeting options.

As Ad Age’s Maureen Morrison reports, the online scrapbooking platform is set to increase the targeting categories available to advertisers.

Currently, there are only 30 categories available for its Promoted Pins product. But when the changes come into effect, “advertisers will […] also be able to target users by audience, such as ‘outdoor enthusiast’”, as well as being able to choose from more refined versions of existing targeting categories.

Morrison wrote: “Previously, for example, a marketer may have been able to target interests broadly in sports, but now it will be able to target specific sports like soccer.”

The plans were revealed by Eric Hadley, Pinterest’s head of partner marketing, speaking at the company’s ‘Pinstitute’ event.

Hadley also spoke of plans for animated pins that animate as users scroll. He declined to confirm whether Twitter would roll out a much-rumoured ‘Buy’ button.

The new features will reportedly undergo testing over the coming months.

Instagram Finally Allows for Clickable Adds, as Part of New ‘Carousel’ Ad Format

In what some might call a long-awaited move, Instagram is finally allowing advertisers to place clickable links to products within ads.

The links will be integrated into a new ‘carousel’ ad format, the company announced in a blog post yesterday.

Carousel ads, the post explains, “give brands more flexibility in telling their stories by allowing people who view their ads to swipe left to see additional images and link to a website of the brand’s choice.”

The new format is likely to significantly increase Instagram’s value as an ROI-generating advertising platform. Without the ability to include links, Instagram has been seen largely as a useful platform for building brand recognition – but not for direct, measurable ROI.

Instagram will be testing carousel ads “on a limited basis” over the coming weeks.

Twitter Tests Easy Access for Tweet-By-Tweet Analytics

Twitter is testing a new feature allowing advertisers to access analytics for individual tweets, straight from their Twitter timeline.

As Marketing Land reports, the feature has been spotted in various forms, including a small bar graph icon, and a ‘View Tweet Activity’ button.

Source: Marketing Land.

Source: Marketing Land.

Once clicked, the image provides statistics on tweet views, link clicks, photo views and more.

This information is already accessible from the Twitter analytics Dashboard, but this feature, if it rolls out officially, should make it easier for advertisers to access the insights they need, when they need them.

Twitter confirmed it was testing the new feature.

Users Can Now Embed Twitter Videos on External Websites

As the war for video domination rages between YouTube and Facebook, Twitter is quietly improving its own video sharing functionality, having launched native video creation in late January.

Its latest move is to allow Twitter-native videos to be embedded on external sites – a feature that, so far, Facebook has yet to implement.

The video-sharing widget, announced on Monday, is accessible from the ‘•••’ button on individual tweets, much like the ‘embed tweet’ feature.

Source: Twitter Developer Blog.

Organisations Promoting Safer Sex Struggling With Social Media Censorship

Advertisers who promote safer sex are facing censorship by social media sites, who are flagging their ads as inappropriate, based on their sexual content.

The Atlantic journalist Amber Madison spoke to several organisations that had faced censorship, including the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, whose Bedsider campaign had gained more than 50,000 followers on Twitter, but had found itself in violation of the platform’s advertising policy for its racy tweets.

To read the full article, click here.

Study Reveals At Least 46,000 Twitter Accounts Promoting ISIS

A new study claims there are ‘at least’ 46,000 Twitter accounts working to promote ISIS activities.

Much has been made of ISIS’s use of Twitter to promote its reign of terror, but few would have predicted the scale of the problem. And according to the study, called The ISIS Twitter Census, 46,000 is the researcher’s “most conservative” estimate – the actual figure could be as high as 70,000.

The BBC reports that the number of ISIS-promoting accounts is likely increasing at a rapid rate, despite Twitter’s efforts to shut down the offending accounts.

Aaron Zelin, an expert on terrorism, told the BBC that the accounts could reach millions of followers. However, he said direct recruitment into ISIS doesn’t tend to happen on Twitter, but on peer-to-peer platforms like WhatsApp, Skype and Kik.

More Social Media Marketing News and Views

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Social Media News Roundup: Prepare to Lose Likes on Facebook

Turning Likes Into Leads: Converting Your Social Community

2014 was somewhat of a breakthrough year for B2B social media marketing. Despite toiling away at what we were certain could be a great business asset since long before, efforts to generate tangible business returns from social media platforms and likes, paid or otherwise, had been largely unsuccessful.

So what changed?

Hubspot

Hubspot came to the forefront in 2014 and gave marketers a whole new level of real-time insight into all of their online activity, including social media. Detailed feedback on the effectiveness of individual tweets and paid social ads allowed marketers to take a more informed and strategic approach to the communications they were putting out through social channels.

Recommended for YouWebcast: Why, What, and How to Do Social Selling

Landing Pages

Although dedicated landing pages have been around for donkey’s years, 2014 seemed to be the year that the penny finally dropped for B2B companies. User-friendly platforms like Unbounce, Hubspot and Optimizely have given marketers the ability to create and test landing pages for their paid ads, emails and social activity without the need for a web developer, thereby increasing adoption.

Paid Social

The acceptance of paid social, combined with the above factors, has played a significant part in the success of B2B social media marketing over the past 12 months. The targeting options available through advertising platforms such as Facebook and Linkedin allow business to hone in on their audiences with accuracy, and although these options have been around since before 2014, this was the year that paid social came into its own.

So now that we know social can deliver tangible returns for B2B companies, here are some key tips to maximise lead generation from social media marketing.

Gate valuable content

By now everyone has heard of content marketing (probably more times than you want) and most businesses understand its importance to SEO, social media and establishing authority. However, just because content serves as SEO fodder, doesn’t mean we should give it ALL away.

Useful, industry-specific content such as white papers, surveys, informative videos and presentations can be effective lead generation tools. By gating these assets (only allowing members of your audience to access the content if they provide contact details via a web form), you can capture valuable data from potential customers who have already hinted at an interest in your area of business.

Promoting these gated assets via social channels, email marketing and paid advertising will maximize your data capture opportunities.

2. Use Webinars

Webinars can be a lead generation gold mine. Not only do they allow you to capture data from those signalling an interest in your products or services by signing up to attend, they also give you an environment free from competitor noise, to talk exclusively about your offering to a captive audience.

Dedicated platforms like GoToWebinar provide data around how many people sat through the webinar and the stage at which others dropped out. It also gives attendees the opportunity to raise their hand to ask the host a question, and chat with fellow hosts throughout.

One of the most valuable tools allows the webinar host to include an interactive poll which can provide valuable data about the attendee’s reason for considering your product, thereby further qualifying the lead.

You could gain more social media exposure by promoting a hashtag at the start of the webinar and encouraging attendees to use it to submit their questions via Twitter.

Pro tip: Sync your activity with your CMS.

Syncing your social activity with your CRM tool allows you to track which social platforms your leads have come from, which tweets, posts or adverts your leads have responded to and ultimately, how much revenue each social platform is contributing.

Both Hubspot and Salesforce, the two most popular CRM tools, sync seamlessly with the major social platforms and provide free guidance on how to nurture your social leads.

Quantifying the financial contribution of social media marketing has long been a problem for marketers and many have abandoned activity altogether after seeing limited returns. However, this approach should ensure that your social activity’s contribution is accurately recognised and easy to report.

3. Use dedicated landing pages

Directing your social traffic to dedicated landing pages, created specifically to capture their details, rather than including a link to your key benefits page or similar, is far more likely to generate leads.

What’s even more likely to generate leads is continually testing and refining your landing pages to optimize their effectiveness.

As alluded to at the start of this post, there are a number of dedicated, user-friendly tools that allow you to create and edit slick looking landing pages with minimal effort. Even better, sync your landing pages with your CMS so your newly acquired leads are fed directly into your sales funnel to be nurtured by your Business Development team. Again, Hubspot contains all of this functionality out of the box. Salesforce doesn’t but it does integrate perfectly with Unbounce, one of the most user-friendly landing pages platforms.

What works for one business won’t necessarily work for all but having seen these tips work well for a number of clients, I’m confident that you will experience similar levels of success by implementing them.

Author: Business.com

Business.com and our market experts are extremely passionate about providing tips and practical advice in these main areas: leadership, sales, marketing, finance, HR, technology and entrepreneurship. Our mission is to help business owners and entrepreneurs acquire the knowledge, products and services to help you run and grow your business…. View full profile ›

Turning Likes Into Leads: Converting Your Social Community

Air China Likes Facebook for Marketing, Despite Ban

An Air China jet on the tarmac at Beijing Capital International Airport.

Facebook in December honored Air China for best use of the social network for international marketing by a company in Greater China. That’s not surprising, since the state-owned carrier has aggressively used the service to offer everything from links to its booking engine, to giveaways of models of the new Boeing 747-8 it flies between Beijing and New York, to a recipe for Rolling Donkey, a popular red bean-and-rice snack. The surprise is that the airline has embraced Facebook even though it’s been banned on the mainland since 2009.

Air China isn’t alone in using the service beyond China’s borders; state-owned rivals China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines, along with privately owned Hainan Airlines, also use Facebook to connect with international passengers. Chinese airlines, says Thomas Crampton, global managing director of Ogilvy & Mather’s Social@Ogilvy team, “are clearly looking to build their connections with people outside of China.”

Despite having its service blocked by China’s government, Facebook is finding ways to profit from Chinese businesses. “We’ve got 1.3 billion people on Facebook, and it turns out that marketing to those people from China works really well,” Facebook Vice President Vaughan Smith told a mobile Internet conference in Beijing last year.

More such collaboration may be ahead. Facebook, which until now has worked with Chinese companies mostly through its Hong Kong office, in 2014 signed a three-year lease for office space in Beijing’s central business district. And last fall, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who’s learning Mandarin, joined the board of Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management, a prominent business school in Beijing.

Air China didn’t respond to multiple e-mails and calls seeking comment for this story. Facebook said it had nothing to add to previous statements.

Social media has become a key tool for Chinese airlines to woo international travelers. About 60 percent of fliers used foreign carriers for their trips to and from China in 2013, Ron Kent, Boeing’s managing director for marketing in Northeast Asia, said at a conference last year. China’s carriers want social sites to help boost their share of that prized group. Air China has more than 153,000 Facebook followers and has had more than 200,000 interactions with users since it opened its page in June 2013, it said in a Dec. 15 statement. The airline has customized Facebook pages for key markets such as North America and Germany. “Using social media is very cost-effective, and airlines can easily reach customers,” Jefferies analyst Boyong Liu said in an e-mail.

Air China also is using Facebook for targeted advertising. In 2012 guests at popular Asian restaurants in Sweden were encouraged to “check in” with the carrier on Facebook as they sat down to eat, making them eligible to win plane tickets to Asia. For the Lunar New Year holiday in February it’s mounting a campaign on the service aimed at Hong Kong-based consumers who want to spend the holiday on the mainland.

Chinese carriers already are big users of social media domestically. China Southern says it has 2.3 million followers on the local Twitter-like Weibo service and 3.5 million fans on Tencent Holdings’s WeChat service. Passengers on the mainland can book air tickets via WeChat, where carriers sometimes offer discounts for transactions made online. Says Ogilvy’s Crampton: “In China, you never have a conversation whether a company needs to be involved in social media; it’s always how they need to be involved.”

The bottom line: Air China has logged more than 200,000 customer contacts on its Facebook pages, boosting marketing efforts.

Air China Likes Facebook for Marketing, Despite Ban