5 Facebook Live Tips For Broadcasting From Your Office

Planning a Facebook Live from your office, a studio or other venue?

Following on from our 5 Facebook Live Lessons From A Crowded Rally, we’ve collated some lessons from Facebook Lives we’ve been part of, in more formal settings.

For good technical and resource reasons, most Facebook Lives take place in formal settings – offices, studios etc. If you’re considering your first Facebook Live, we’d recommend a formal setting for your first one or two Lives. Live broadcast from a fast-moving event like a rally, is fantastic content, but can be challenging, and better to build up to once you’ve had a bit of experience broadcasting in a quieter environment.

Ready for the outdoor challenge? Check out our 5 Facebook Live Lessons From A Crowded Rally  

Thinking about an office-based Live? Here are our top five lessons learned from conducting a Facebook Live broadcast in-house at your office or studio.

1. Take advantage of your onsite tech

If you’re hosting a Live from your office or a studio, as opposed to an event environment, take the opportunity to optimally use the tech you have available to you. Great wifi, good sound, a steady camera and decent lighting all make your video much more watchable. Yes, viewers will watch Live content with less polish – that can even be part of the appeal – but if you can offer a steady camera and clear sound, you’ll keep people watching longer. Running a live from your office, is also a great opportunity to hone your tech, team and skills, before you venture out to more vibrant environments.

2. Take live questions and host your community properly

In the calm of your office you can assign someone to handle best-practice community management. Your community manager can get stuck into the comments, welcoming people, sharing relevant links, discussing points, driving clicks to more information, and handling questions that will pop up during the broadcast. Taking questions direct from your Facebook comments during the live stream, is such a great audience proposition to drive engagement. In the formal environment, you can swiftly relay questions from your community directly into the live for debate. If resources or space is tight, you can even use a community manager who’s not in the room – in our experience, a well-briefed colleague in another country even can provide very smooth community management. Relaying questions for the live via WhatsApp, and freeing up those in the room for tasks that can only be done there.

3. Prepare – but don’t over-rehearse

Live broadcasting is challenging, and those in front of the camera for your Live should be well prepared, briefed and to some degree rehearsed for the Live. Make sure they’ll know when they’re live, how they’re taking questions, who’s in which role, how they’ll know or communicate to wrap up and anything else that will make the conversation flow. But, by broadcasting a live from your office or a studio you do risk lacking energy, and this can be exacerbated with over-rehearsal. Be sure not to script, which can make for stilted conversation, and leave space for spontaneity and a natural flow of conversation. Again, use your controlled environment to get everyone used to the tech and build rapport before going live.

4. Go long

Ideally Facebook Lives are 10-15 minutes, giving a chance for your maximum audience to grow. In an external environment, your lack of control of the surroundings may mean this is not attainable. A huge advantage of your formal setting is the chance to hit this milestone. Be sure to work with your speakers to ensure they have enough content to sustain this length. Bringing in second speakers can be a great way to do this – 5-10 minutes with person A, and then a second viewpoint to wrap up.

5. Download and reuse

By capturing your video in a formal environment, your content may be great for reuse on other platforms like Instagram or Twitter – particularly if your sound, lighting etc are slick, you may be able to edit up portions of your live for use on other platforms as recaps and key messages. Be sure to save the original videos of your broadcast to your device with the ‘save to camera roll’ function, as this will be a higher quality than the video that you’ve streamed live

Be sure to check out our other Facebook Live blog posts:

• 5 Facebook Live Lessons From A Crowded Rally

• Social Media Video: The Ultimate Guide

• Facebook Live: Technical Tips and Best Practice

• Facebook Live: 4 Unique Ways Livestream Video

Do you have any other questions for us about Facebook Live coordination or cause-focused social media for nonprofits? Get in touch!