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What do you do when you get a couple dozen breathless emails from people planning a vacation to the place you live, folks who need to make a decision fast as to whether they should cancel their vacation or not, because there’s a volcano that’s about to erupt there…..?

Well, what I did was my first Facebook Live video experiment.

It was just me talking for several minutes about the impending volcanic eruption here in the island of Bali, Indonesia where I’ve had a place since 2005. Not hard for me to do.

In a few hours I’ll send it out to several thousand subscribers on my email list for that site.

Lately I’ve been writing here on Digital Media Minute about how Facebook and YouTube see much more engagement with live video, so their algorithms now favor it. I’ll translate that for those of you who aren’t marketing geeks like me. It means free exposure.

The thing is that live video done right can have both extremely low costs and be very effective. You could deliver whatever you’re doing in the form of tutorials, AMAs (Ask Me Anything), revies of products, interviews, etc.

As a viewer I know I’d be more forgiving of small production slipups, too many “ums” and a shaking camera (the last two of which you’ll see above!), if it was delivered live. It just seems more interesting because you feel like anything can happen.

A person told me after he saw this live video session that he was just mesmerized by the fact that I was speaking live from the other side of the world about what was happening this morning in Bali. There’s an immediacy with live video that you aren’t getting with the wall-to-wall non-live video Facebook is showing you in your News Feed n0wadays.

At any rate, I’m seeing both Youtube Live and Facebook Live video a lot more from marketers I respect, just in the last few months.

So why can’t I do the same? And, for that matter, why can’t you? What’s your expertise?

I can leverage a tropical island and I can talk about expat-ism, digital nomads and generally using the Internet to make money till the cows come home. A lot of people in the world aren’t too interested in those topics, but enough are for me to talk to them.

So tactic number one for me will to see if I can swing my subscriber list around to follow me on Facebook, and then see if I can get them to show up when I have something to talk about.

I think the plan for now is to go in with one narrow-ish topic that I can cover in two or three minutes, and just do so as well as I can and then sign off. Don’t waste anyone’s time and don’t bore them.

Of course if someone has questions I could segue into other answers or topics.

What I don’t want to do is the be one of these guys who, well, just talk. I wouldn’t disparage anyone’s business model but I the other night I saw basically the direction I don’t want to go: a guy with purple hair was walking around San Francisco looking for a place to eat. Several hundred people were watching his YouTube Live broadcast.

Finally, he ordered onion rings. That was the point of the video….. More power to him.

The ‘M’ Word

And making money with live video? My attitude is that if you have the audience there is always a way to make money from it. Especially if your intentions are good and ypu really do ‘provide value’, even if that value is entertainment.

Either entertain or help. Or both.

Lord knows I’m not very entertaining but I’ve helped a lot of people make money online and also make the transition to becoming an expat. It’s a start.

And it was fun.

Now I just need an Airselfie.

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Way back in March of 2016 Facebook announced that its algorithm would be favoring live video content even more than it does regular native video in News Feed.

Remember that Facebook didn’t arbitrarily decide to do this: naturally it’s a response to user consumption patterns.

When a company tells you not only what’s working best for engaging users on its platform, but that they’re basically changing the rules to favor content produced in a given format, you’d think that companies would sit up, take notice and aggressively move into producing content in that format, at least to test.

But in this case, at least so far, you’d be wrong. Take a look at this chart from socialbakers. What do you see? I see a huge, gaping opportunity for brands, or companies of any size.

Think of the advantages of making use of Facebook Live in 2017:

• People like it. Facebook users are more likely to (consume/engage) with live video content.
• Facebook really hopes you’ll use it. All else being equal, Facebook will give you an advantage in the News Feed over other types of content the competition is creating.
• Potentially low production costs. By applying some creativity, cost-conscious companies and brands can keep the expense of leveraging live video relatively low. Post-production costs are not a factor with live video, and you’ll probably be forgiven for not having slick production with Facebook Live. It’s easy to imagine approaches that make use of spontaneity, personality and raw information over elaborate sets, etc. All this adds up to real opportunity for disruption vs companies with larger budgets.
• Competitive advantage. Your competition in your niche is probably having a hard time making Facebook Live work for them, or more likely, aren’t even trying!
• A chance to leverage organic reach again. This is not paid advertising. The costs of this exposure is limited to production costs which again, can be kept low. Even testing paid Facebook ads can get expensive. One good idea well-executed with Facebook Live could achieve or exceed the kind of reach we’d love to achieve with paid ads.

If you’re handling marketing for a company of any size, you should be testing ways to reach prospects and customers with Facebook Live.

For marketing agencies the opportunity is profound. Look again at the chart above. In 18 months the adoption of Facebook Live by brands is virtually negligible.

An agency that can find a way to help its clients systematically make effective use of Facebook Live would be filling a huge need from which it could really expand its client base.