How Long Should You Go Facebook Live For?
Facebook Live streaming is the best and most engaging function Facebook gives you to share content with your audience. Though Facebook Live you gain a prominent position on the timelines of your friends, page fans and/or group members because Facebook are so keen for Facebook Live to become the market leader for live streaming apps.
They have updated the app a lot since April 2016 to include features from the major competitors. They have the reactions floating across the screen and added the ability to able to draw on screen the same way Periscope does. They also provide functionality that most live streaming apps do not provide, such as the ability to lifestream from a desktop, and the ability to use face filters and screen filters.
But when you go Live on Facebook, how long should you stream for? This all depends on three factors.
What do you want to gain from it?
Do you plan to run an ad on it?
Does your Live stream have a fixed duration or an open duration?
- What do you want to gain from your Live Stream?
If you want to build brand awareness, you will want people to get to know you and/or like your page. Therefore you should optimise the stream for engagement. This means you will want to keep the stream going for as long as possible so that you get plenty of viewers to get reactions, comments, shares and page likes from.
If you are looking to optimise the stream to communicate the value of your product, you will want to keep the length as concise. Once you start padding, the value of the product will lose effectiveness and will start losing viewers that may never come back.
- Do you plan to run an ad on it?
If you are going to put an ad on your Facebook stream, it is probably best you keep the stream optimised to keep people’s attention. A 90 minute to 3 hour stream will probably not get many people watching, because they will see that too much of their time is required to watch the stream. In this instance you will probably want to keep your stream going for anywhere between 30 mins to 1 hour.
keep the length to 30 minutes. This will make viewers feel they will learn something beneficial but not have to spend too much time away from their family, friends or day to day activities. In this time you will be able to hold their attention to convey the value of your stream, and possibly be able to secure a sale out of it.
- If your stream is talking about a “Top 3/5/10 ways to…” then you will probably only have about 30-60 minutes of content length. In which case you have a fixed duration, or at least a limited duration. This can be a good thing, because if the value of the content is good, you may get some great engagement and a page likes out of it. However, there is a massive benefit to having an open ended duration. Ultimately you have your whole lifetime to mix and match the durations and content of your streams, so there is no need to worry.
If you have an open ended duration, this can be magic, and here is why.
The beauty of Facebook being the number one Social Network in the world is most of your friends and fans will be on there rather than on Twitter, YouTube or Instagram. Therefore when you go live, you are far more likely to be seen by a lot of people than on any other streaming app.
The way to capitalise on the visibility you have to so many users is to be live for as long as possible. The reason why you are able to get so much organic reach on Facebook is because timelines is where most people spend their time on Facebook. So by staying online for as long as possible, you are capturing people as they log on at different times. You should think of your live stream as a large fishing net, the longer you stay online , the further you can cast your net and capture more fish.
Once I go live on Facebook, I appear in front of my friends and fans that are online on their timeline at that time, and the number of live watchers starts to accumulate. Then as you continue to engage people and keep them watching you, new viewers start joining the stream, and this momentum continues for the duration of your stream.
PRO TIP: If you, or someone you ask, can share the stream to as many appropriate groups as possible, then you will appear on the timelines of people following these groups.
It is important that the stream you are doing is relevant to the group you are sharing in, otherwise a) they may not approve it and b) they may ban you from the group, which will prevent you posting in that group ever again. The best thing to do is to keep the administrators happy so that you can keep re-using the audience time and time again.
So in summary, it is best to stay online for as long as you can, if possible. There will come a point when you will have no more content to provide, in which case you should end it and not waffle.
