4 new Facebook Live features that are game-changing for marketers

By Krishna Subramanian

Everyone appreciates perfectly curated. But do you know what is even cooler? Connecting with your audience through relatable content.

One way that brand marketers establish an authentic connection with audiences is to give them a behind-the-scenes, in-the-moment, look through Facebook Live.

As a matter of fact, on Facebook one out of every five videos is a live stream. This allows the audience to dive deeper, see the imperfections and authentically develop a true emotional connection between themselves and the promoted brand.

Facebook recently launched new updates to Live that will enable brand marketers to get in front of their target audiences quicker and easier than ever.

• Persistent Stream Keys: Previously, creators would receive a stream key that could only be used for a one-time-use Facebook Live post/stream. In doing so, brands would need to ensure that creators have a new stream key every single time they used Facebook Live to post content.

Thanks to the update, one can obtain a persistent, permanent stream key for repeated use – meaning lesser lag time when using Facebook Live.

For example, if a brand wants to do a Facebook Live takeover, it merely needs to send the creators, production team and publishers their stream key, making setup much more efficient.

• Facebook Live Rewind: A Facebook feature that is currently in the testing phase is the option to rewind a Facebook Live stream. This is a huge benefit for branded content, as it can allow users to rewind and gain context around a Facebook Live stream, whereas before they would have to wait until the feed ended to rewatch the entire stream.

This is especially helpful to brands where their content has a specific cadence to follow, for example, a recipe.

Doreen Colondres partnered with American Heart Association to promote “Healthy For Good,” a campaign encouraging a healthy, better lifestyle where she showed fans how to create healthy Avocado Pesto sauce.

https://www.facebook.com/doreen.colondres/videos/1451214564926035/

Doreen’s fans got to experience a one-to-one direct interaction with her as she created the recipe.

With the Facebook Live Rewind feature, brand marketers can rest assured that at whatever point they began viewing the Facebook Live stream, fans can rewind the stream if they have missed a key ingredient mentioned.

• Facebook Live Crossposting: The entire purpose of branded content is to amplify brand reach and awareness leading to increased brand interaction.

With crossposting, brands and creators will have the ability to aggregate views, comments and Likes by using Facebook Live to broadcast a single post on various pages.

Instead of having to post only on either the creator, brand or publisher page, now one video can be native to all involved pages, amplifying brand reach to the max.

Last year, Bobby Parish & Maddi Jane took fans for a unique Behind-the-Scenes tour of the M&M Factory in Kansas in honor of the new Caramel flavor launch.

The content stream, which lives on the Meijer page, has attracted over a half-million views, and in the future crossposting can amplify brand success to the next level.

https://www.facebook.com/meijer/videos/10154711087496636/

• Facebook Live Premieres: Premieres is an up and coming feature that, if all goes well), will allow brands and creators to take pre-recorded video footage and publish footage as a live streaming feed.

Though this takes away from the raw feel of a true Facebook Live stream, this will allow brand marketers to carefully position content and publish it in a strategic manner, without worrying about any potential errors.

Krishna Subramanian is cofounder of Captiv8, San Francisco. Reach him at ksub@captiv8.io.