How to Live Stream: The Complete Guide for Businesses
By Jim Bask
Facebook Live is great for exposure
Probably the best-known example of live streaming right now is Facebook Live. This allows users and pages to live stream from their mobile device or desktop, with viewers being able to comment (as standard Facebook comments) and react (“Like”, “Love”, etc) in real time.
Stream quality on Facebook is usually pretty good, and the site’s massive user base provides a huge potential audience for the video.
The main disadvantage of Facebook Live comes when you try to repurpose your content. Facebook videos don’t rank in Google, and even though you can autosave footage to your timeline, it will quickly get buried in your audience’s news feeds.
In other words, if you want to get traffic to your videos going forwards, you’ll have to manually reupload them to Youtube.
After all, Facebook isn’t designed to be a site of evergreen content – it’s millions of separate timelines that are all about the here-and-now. Facebook Live is a great option if you’re just looking to engage your audience and get some exposure, but not so much for structured or evergreen clips.
In short, Facebook Live:
- Has the largest potential audience
- Isn’t great for the audience interacting with the streamer
- Isn’t designed for evergreen videos
- Very good for show-and-tell casual streams
- Has desktop and mobile streaming capabilities