193 – Up Your Facebook Live Game: Tom talks Facebook Live Tips

Episode 193 – Facebook Live Tips
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with episode 193 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, I'm going to be talking about Facebook Live Tips. Now, even with technical difficulties, which are in many cases out of my control, I've still made a lot of money with this. So. So get ready for some powerful tips. I hope you didn't miss Episode 192. That was Shane Willis. Now, this guy overcame a massive real estate crash and then went on to help tons of other people to buy homes. So I hope you didn't miss that. Episode 192. Now our podcast app's in the App Store. Make sure you go grab it. I've been telling you this for like the last hundred episodes. Get that app, put it on your phone and then we've got really cool instructions to show you how to use it, which most people don't give you these in-depth instructions. And you can check it out at screwthecommute.com/app. And while you're at it, grab a copy of our How to Automate Your Business e-book. I mean, this book has saved me over seven and a half million keystrokes and allowed me to handle up to a hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and forty thousand customers without pulling my hair out, really going to help you. And we sell it for twenty seven bucks, but it's yours free as my thanks for listening. So check that out and then also grab while you're there at the download page. I got another surprise for you that people were charging for five and six thousand bucks for. So grab that white paper at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Our sponsor is the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia it's a Distance Learning School, which teaches legitimate techniques to make a great living, either working for someone else or starting your own online business. And I have been living this and breathing this for twenty five years since the commercial internet started. So this is a high quality school. It's the only one of its kind in the country. It's licensed by the state of Virginia. And you can learn from anywhere in the world you can get an Internet connection. So check it out at IMTCVA.org or give me a call and I can help you decide on your Internet future. And then later, I'm going to encourage you if you have any aspirations to higher education to watch a webinar I created. So I'll tell you a little bit about that later.

[00:03:01] All right. Let's get to the main event, Facebook Live Tips. Now, one of the first tips is make sure you got a really good Internet connection whenever you're doing this. I mean, when you're out in the field or out by the ocean or something, yeah, it could be a little bit troublesome, but you can still get through and people will understand that. But if you do want him to make money from a position in your office, you know, make sure you've got a good Internet connection. Now you're going to have to decide on what software to use. And I'm going to have a section on that. The very, you know, in a second or so. And we will break this whole thing down into what to do before you go live. What to do during a live event and what to do after the event to make it a great event and also to make money.

[00:03:47] All right, so let's talk about the software. Well, the raw Facebook live part is fine. It's the most rudimentary way to go live. And I've done it lots of times, especially when it's a live that's not planned that I'm out and about somewhere. You can just go live with the raw Facebook function and you don't have to use any other software. And it's always ready to go on your phone. And this is what I and everybody else started with to begin with, that's all there was. Now, one of the things you run into, if you just do the default Facebook is the text behind you on a whiteboard or on your wall or on your t shirt is all backwards. Well, you don't. It doesn't have to be that way. And most people don't know this. So what you do is, is as soon as you click live and of course, things change rapidly. But currently, there's a little magic wand at the bottom right of your screen. Click on that. And then on the next screen, you'll see like boxes with vertical lines through them, either a horizontal box or a vertical box with a big horizontal line through it. Well, if you click on that, that switches your camera somehow and then all the text is readable behind you or on your t shirt or anything. So a lot of people don't know that. So if you're going to use the raw Facebook app make sure you practice that a couple times and you'll see how you can make things readable. Now, you can also have a guest in the raw Facebook app, but it's darn complicated. All right. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to this. Facebook will tell you how to do it, but it's just complicated. Now, if you're standing next to your friend at the beach and you just point the camera at them and you're all talking and one time, that's great. But if you had a remote. Yes, that's troublesome and very complicated. So the links there, if you want to give it a try. So then the next thing I graduated to is an app for my phone called Switcher Go. It was on an iPhone and this allowed me to automatically straighten out the text and the display up to four photos. And I think it allowed video to. And I use that for a long time. Then I went to belive.TV that let me display a bunch of photos and graphics and it allowed me to show my desktop and put comments of the people watching on the video screen to give them shout outs and a bunch other cool stuff. The problem is, is that it failed on me three times now and I'm still using that as of the day before I'm recording this podcast. And so I had to scramble to get the event completed. And yeah, it's cheap and it's worth a look at if you have a great Internet connection and and things aren't super critical. I mean, some of these things are always out of your control when you're depending on other services. But it's failed on me three times now. So what I'm looking into now and a boy was just cringing at the thought. It's called the wirecast that's kind of the gold standard. But the version that I need is like $450 and they have a version as high as seven hundred dollars. All right. And for thousands of dollars, they'll sell you an entire streaming setup with the hardware and the monitors and everything. You know, so. So that's what I'm looking at now. But the first thing I'm going to do is I'm jacking my FiOS internet connection to the max. So that's what I'm working on now first.

[00:07:38] The next thing is OBS. Now, OBS has all kinds of features, kind of like wirecast and it's free. The problem is you got to be a techno nerd to make it operate. It's got lots of technical details that are taken care of for you with something like wirecast. But if you're technically oriented, OBS is a free way to do this. It's one of those open source software.

[00:08:04] Now, these other ones I haven't tried for this crowdcast, livestream, Xsplit with the letter X and then split and then the next one is FFmpeg. Haven't tried any of those. Now some people are saying you can you can use Zoom for this. And I do use Zoom for recording podcasts and things. I do that all the time with guests, but I've never used it to go live on Facebook, so I haven't tried that. So I would say to play around with the cheap and free ones and practice using the only me function. This is in your setting somewhere where you can practice and get comfortable with whatever software you choose to use and and you can make sure that you only see it. So look in your settings for Facebook. I think it says like who should see this? And you pick only me and you can practice all you want without anybody else seeing it.

[00:09:01] The next little section is getting more people to watch and remember, this is all before you go live. So tell people you're going to go live and when and where and how to watch. See, non sophisticated audiences have trouble with a lot of this stuff. So you really have to spell it out for them. You can have. And also I suggest having another monitor or computer running or your cell phone open and maybe your messenger text available for people that can't figure it out. So you can know when it's live. You can take a second to say hello. Let me text this person and help him get in. You know, things like that are OK as long as you don't take hours doing it. Another thing you should do is make an event on Facebook and invite people. See, Facebook live is is more like an event than a blog post or a static video, and it it gets 10 times the engagement. So it's a really good thing. Now you won't be able to invite all your friends. And even if you could, it might not be a good idea. Here's why. If you invite a load of people and very few show up, Facebook will keep limiting how many people you can invite. So be judicious about the people that you invite that have the best chance of success and you're really close friends. Beg them in the beginning to take an invite and actually show up so that it gets the ball rolling for it.

[00:10:34] Now you should cross-promote with email and other social media. See, I send people from my email to the event page and I tell them to click going and then I tell them to show up at my business page and also make sure you mentioned the time zone for this. I also use a Facebook messenger list to send that out, which gets a high open rate and a high click through rate. It's not like email. And also think about when you will get the most viewers and experiment with different times of days and different days of the week, and that includes evenings and weekends. Now, unless it's impromptu, write a good description to give people a reason to listen and put keywords in it. You know, I've harped on key words my entire career helping people online. So Episode 1, an episode 130 of this podcast is something you should always review and and make it part of your business online or offline because the whole world revolves around keywords and in your Facebook lives are the same thing. So put keywords in it, put keywords in the name of the event. Also whenever possible. So those are places, these keywords to help you be found. Now you can broadcast either horizontally or vertically, so do what makes sense for whatever you want to display on the screen. Then share the event and see that when people sign up with the event with ...going or interested, they can pick either going or interested. They will get notices through Facebook automatically. It's like almost like an auto responder. That's why one of the reasons I do an event so I can invite people and then I don't have to worry about them getting notices that the event is going to happen because Facebook handles that. So anyway, ask people to share the event.

[00:12:34] Now prepare and set up where you're going to do the event. So I have my easy chair and one of my living rooms and I have a light. I'll tell you a little bit about glare and stuff and glasses if you happen to wear glasses. And I just have a little tray table in front of me and my dogs are in the crate sitting there. You can't see them, but they're there. And the big screen TV's in front of me. It's just a relaxing thing for me. I don't have a special place for it. In other words, now, it's not that you shouldn't. It's just that I you know, to me it's more of a hey, this is the way Tom works. You know, I sit at home. It's my lifestyle business.

[00:13:15] Now, when I said about asking for shares. Keep that up throughout the event. We're not talking about running the event yet. But I just want to remind you that see people's check in during the event. And you want to keep reminding people to share and all the other stuff we'll talk about during running the event. And like I said, practice with the only me function and prepare ahead of time for late comers. See people come in. You know, especially if somebody is on there and likes it and they share it with one of their friends that never heard about it. Somebody could come in in the middle of it. So when I say prepare for late comers, that means you want to have something that tells people when the screen appears for them, what's what it's about? What's going on? Some people have a whiteboard behind them with the title of the program. Some people now what I do is I have lower thirds that I can display on my screen. Basically graphics and text. So I have the name of the event and the title there. Now I can switch that out as we go. But for if I'm just sitting there with nothing else to put on the screen, I like to have the title on there because people that come in late will say all fifteen ways to jazz up your videos. I want to watch this, you know? So that's preparing for late comers.

[00:14:40] Now, here's the thing about glare on glasses. What I do is I put a light off to the side and I was having trouble with this for a while. See, because I do it on a laptop and the laptop webcam is kind of exactly in line when I'm looking at it onto my glasses. So there's the light of the screen, hits my glasses and it bounces back into the webcam, making a big glare of my glasses. No good. People should see your eyes. And I tried to reduce the screen thing, but then I couldn't see the screen. The intensity or the brightness of the screen. So I could do that. But then I couldn't see the screen. All right. So so basically, I went back to my video training and I put a light off to the side that's lighting me up. And then I did reduce the screen somewhat just to the point where the glare went off my glasses. And then one other little tip is you can tip the temples up on your glasses, off your ears to change the angle of your glasses so that if glare does hit it, it it shoots down instead of directly into your webcam. I was pointing to myself at the microphone and then learn how to reduce the brightness of your screen.

[00:15:55] All right, now here's a really big one on my notes, I got it in all caps and giant is look at the camera. If you're on a cell phone or Web cam or a laptop, people and I am guilty of this myself, you want to look at what's on the screen while you're talking? Well, that makes you look shady. You're not actually looking at the people. So this is something you need to practice every time you're doing a webcam or facetime on your phone or something. Force yourself to look at the lens and not what's on the screen because they are seeing on the other end, somebody's looking not at them. That's looking off camera. It just makes and it's just looking off camera enough to make you look weird or shady. So force yourself to look at the camera and it doesn't really light up on your cell phone. So you have to know where it is. A lot of times all if I forget, because some of the phones like look all black. I was like, where's the camera? I'll put my finger on it. And to see on the screen where the lens where the camera was and that. And then I force myself to look at it. So make sure you look at the camera and then, like I said, practice before you use it for the first time, consider doing a practice run. Use the privacy settings. So only you see it then and there you go.

[00:17:31] OK. Now, one other thing to get more people to watch your broadcast is to go live often. Don't like go months between them. All right. So the more often you go live, the more the word will spread and you'll get regular watchers and so forth. OK, so now let's go to during the broadcast. Now, one of the things you can it'll be in the show notes is live.fb.com gives you lots of tips just from Facebook about your broadcast. Now, this also goes in getting more people to watch. But this is during the broadcast, avoid short broadcasts. See, the longer you broadcast, the more likely people are to discover and invite their friends on Facebook to watch the video. So don't go less than 10 minutes and you can I think you can go up to four hours. You don't need to go that long unless you're doing some citizen journalists or something. Also, give people time in the beginning to to let them check in. Everybody's always late for these things. And one of the things you can remind people to do is on the live video or after it was live. They can tap on the follow button and then opt in to get notifications the next time you go live. So you want to remind people that that's something that I just learned recently and I have to start doing myself.

[00:19:17] When you're running the show, stall, like I said, stall a little bit at the beginning with general information, giveaways, contests and such to give people a chance to show up live. And you can, of course, repeat those later after people show up. That way, the people watching the video get that information right away and then it reinforces that when you repeat it later in the show. So welcome people and remind them about the topic and remind them about the topic as you go, because people check in during the broadcast and they won't know what you're talking about. And like I said earlier, prepare for late comers. So also have something on the screen that tells what's going on. So I just did 15 ways to jazz up your videos. So I had that as a lower third running for most of the event. So anybody checking in later would see that's what this is about. Now give shoutouts to people. Tell them, put their Web site in. Put where they're from. Get them engaging with you. That's another reason they want to show up because they get promotion in front of your other viewers. So until you get, you know, hundreds of viewers where that would be unwieldy to to get that many people shoutouts, you can say a lot of them, but put them on the screen, each one of them might get too much. But but you can always as people check it in. Hey, Joe. Hey, Sally. Hey, this is that. Hey, there's from so-and-so dot com. And do it as best as you can until it gets you get so many people that it's you can't do it anymore.

[00:20:56] Show visuals. That's one of the reasons I switched to belive is because I could show as many pictures as I want. I can show my screen play videos and so forth. Now invite engagement. Tell people put your questions in there. Say please comment. It helps the show be seen more. Facebook live drives 10 times the comments of a static video and. If people are engaging. So if more people show up and more people engage, Facebook lets you invite more people next time. All right. So this is important to get people engaging with you and leaving comments and give them excuses to do it.

[00:21:39] Now always work in stuff you want to sell. For instance, my 15 ways the jazz up your videos is designed or that event is designed to lead people to screwthecommute.com/videoweekend. That's where people come either in a group or one on one and get deep video training and on location stuff and lighting and all the equipment, stuff like that. So. So that's why I'm doing that one now.

[00:22:10] Get people to email you for additional resources, for instance, again on the Jazz Up your video episode. I had people ask me for a video showing them how the video weekend goes. You can all do that to just send me an email to orders@antion.com and I'll send you a email with a YouTube link to show you how the whole weekend goes. And we chronicle a guy going through the whole weekend. So it's very informative and inspiring if you want to come here. Do giveaways where they have to go to your Web site to opt into your email list. We always to this day people at my level make our most money on email. Yes, we want a messenger list. Yes. You'll want to have a text list. And, you know, even snail mail list. But the big money with the least risk is e-mail. So get them on your email list, do giveaways to do that and get them on your messenger list, too. But try not to do those at the same time because people get confused. Give them one thing to do and then later in the event, give them another thing to do. So go to your messenger list and do that. See, messenger lists can be taken away from you instantly if Facebook changes things, but your email list is your solid gold thing to get them on first.

[00:23:29] I mean, use good storytelling on your video. People love to hear stories. If you have too many comments, this is back to the comments. Get somebody to help you answer a lot of the standard ones and then you say the the or have your helper feed you the most important ones. That would be the most interesting to the most people. And you can respond to them on the event and you can always block people who are troublesome. You click on their profile and then you click block. I've never actually had to do this in the hundreds of events I've done and then always give a call to action. Get him to do something because they're on the thing. In my example I'm using here, go to screwthecommute.com/videoweekend and check out and see how videos can really hyper rocket your business or something like that.

[00:24:22] All right. Now after the event. See, I still get questions from people. Will there be a replay? And this tells me that the person is not Facebook savvy. See, these events these Facebook lives are instantly available. So I tell them this and I tell them how to go watch it. But I also I get to the link, the there's a there's a permalink to the event and the way you find that is on your live, it says three hours ago. Or it says yesterday or it says what date it was. If you click that, it gives you this humongous link. Now all you need is the main part of the link. You can eliminate or, you know, get rid of it. It's like a humongous thing. So you just cut it off. Back to I think there's a question mark. I cut off the question mark and everything. To the left of that is the link. The permalink to the event. And then I could promote that through email to everybody that missed it. So they don't have to be there at a certain time. But I can send that permalink out through email or my other social media or even Facebook again if I felt like it. But most of the time I use the link through other media and then I make a big list of them. In fact, I'll give you a list in the show notes of some of my past training events. Now I used to do a Sunday night variety show, but I won't give you the links to all those. There was every Sunday for a long time. I did the variety show on Facebook live. But I'll just give you the links to the training sessions so you can see the link and you can see the name of the show. And you can go back and listen to it, because trying to find it in my timeline would be search forever. But these links will take people right to them. So that gives you even more watches.

[00:26:17] After the show, you can go back and address comments that you missed. You can like comments. You can write replies. You can encourage more comments and shares even after the event is done. So once it's done, you just don't say, oh, sure, glad that's over. And then go on your merry way. No use what you got to the max. All right. So go back and do all those things with the comments.

[00:26:46] Now, another thing most people don't know is you can edit some of the stuff after the fact. If you click on that date stamp, I mean, anything I say could change tomorrow. But chances are you'll still be able to do this in some fashion. But anywhere you click on the date stamp, click on options and then click edit video. And you probably have to do this from Facebook.com, not through your apps or anything, but you can add more descriptions. You can change the thumbnails so that what people see, you can add or change the location and date. You can provide longer description. You can select a different category. And nobody is really sure how the search function works on Facebook and how it's going to work in the future. So just get all your keywords in there and. And if there's anything that needs change, change it after the fact.

[00:27:46] Then you can if it's a really good episode or I call episode because of a podcast right now. If it's a really good show or event, you can pin it to the top so that everybody hits your page is exposed to it. Or you could make it a featured video. And then the last thing would be this check your video insights to see if there's anything you can learn about when people dropped off and you know, you might. I don't do this a lot, but if you check them, a lot of people don't even know they're there. So check your video insights and see the kind of stuff that they the information you can get about what you just did it or create kind of a be a an electronic critique of your performance. All right. So do all those things and you'll really increase your engagement on Facebook live. More people will watch. More people will share. You'll sell more stuff. You'll get more people on your e-mail list. So this is a pretty much free way if you don't use any of the fancy software which belive.TV is not really expensive. And OBS, if you can figure it out, is totally free and can make really great productions. So so check all that out. Improve your Facebook lives and I think you'll thank me for it.

[00:29:07] So folks, I'm down on my knees begging you to check out a particular webinar or pass it on to someone that could use it. It has to do with higher education. If you're considering getting retrained because you hate what you're doing or or you want a better life for yourself and your family, or if you have kids or nephews, nieces and neighbors who are wondering if they should burn up hundreds of thousands of dollars and then end up broke with mountains of debt and no marketable skills, you just got to watch this higher education webinar and be prepared to be mad about it, too, because you're going to see some things on how they're jacking up grade point average averages artificially to make people think that they're smarter so they can charge you more money. And then the testing is showing that they're dumber. This isn't just me hawking my school. All right. This is higher education people telling what's wrong with the system. And they they did a study over, I think, two thousand kids in many different schools. And I think forty five percent of them said they didn't learn a thing after four years. And then they did averages on other stuff. They said the most of the kids in college are spending eight hours total on class and preparation for class per week, eight hours total. The rest of the time is partying and eating and shopping. All right. Do you really want to mortgage your house to pay for that when your kid could get a as a usable skill that everybody on earth needs and wants in a in six months like it myself, something like my school. It's a vocational school. It's considered so. So check out that webinar at screwthecommute.com/webinars. You can either watch the webinar, which has all the graphics in the books that I'm referencing and everything. Or you can download the MP3 or listen to it online there. And please, please, please check it out if you have any aspirations for higher education. So you don't get ripped off and that's at screwthecommute.com. Click on webinar.

[00:31:17] All right, folks, that's Facebook Live tips and I will catch you on the next episode. See ya later.

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