How to Market a Facebook Live Stream

At Mighteor, the company I started in 2013, we make internet video for brands. We work with midsized and large brands to help them expand their reach and grow their businesses through livestreaming to social media. A previous article called How To Convert Livestream Viewers Into Customers focused on strategies for using key performance indicators (KPI) to track and assess the real business value of a live stream, and how to turn viewers into contacts and purchasers.

A closely related question is how to market and promote the streams themselves on popular social platforms like Facebook Live and YouTube Live, how to make sure that followers watch your streams, and how to reach viewers outside of your existing base of followers.

The first thing that our customers do when they have a stream coming up on Facebook Live or YouTuve Live is to get really focused on which platform (or platforms) they’re going to offer the stream on, and take measures to make sure they drive a lot of traffic there that day.

To begin with, they’ll probably spend a little bit more money on ads. One thing that I tell our clients is if they want to really support a livestream on Facebook, they probably want to spend between $500 and $1,000 just on Facebook ads to drive traffic to the post where that time slot is going to be pushed.

That’s a good way to drive some traffic on the day of your stream. If that stream is really converting for you and you’re getting a lot of new emails, or you’re finding that youR promo code is being used a lot, you can put some more paid marketing behind it. But generally, focusing on the day of the stream is most effective. Let’s just say we’re streaming at 2:00 PM Eastern Time. We’ll run ads from 7:00 AM to noon to drive traffic to sign up.

Another thing that we do is send out an RSVP. Sending out an RSVP and evaluating the response tells us if there’s enough audience interest in a topic to make it worth a livestream before we’ve actually planned it.

There is a major publishing house that we work with who frequently will send out emails saying, “Hey, do you want to talk to the top mommy authors of the year?” Depending on the interest, we’ll then produce the show.

We start to gather the RSVPs far before we actually program the show. That’s a way to determine if this content actually going to be a converter for us. As you might expecvt, if nobody wants to watch it, it’s probably not going to convert.

The final way is to try to get brands on a cadence. You can’t just say, “We're going to do a livestream once a year, and it’s going to be on some random Wednesday, and then some random Tuesday the next year.”

The brands I see the most value in livestreaming get into a programmatic cadence with their streaming program, just like any other marketing vertical that they’re working on. They’ll say, “We stream on the first Tuesday of the month at 10:00 AM eastern time, and that’s when we stream.” You start to build some audience expectation around that, and you can actually build a marketing plan up to that Tuesday that supports that plan.