My experience hosting a Facebook Live Q&A

We’re a couple weeks out from Hodges’ first-ever Facebook live event and still I find it hard to watch the archived video. Don’t get me wrong, the event exceeded our expectations and the feedback from viewers was amazing. In fact, someone even recognized Jon at a downtown restaurant and asked him if he was the guy from the Facebook live event…in our minds, we’re stars!

The reality, however, is that it’s hard to watch and listen to recorded versions of ourselves – we’re our own worst critics. Plus, we know this information so well that sometimes it’s hard to convey it simply and without jargon. Even so, as I look back on the event and prepare for future ones, here are some key takeaways:

1. This is no one-man job. We had a team of people managing everything from production, fielding questions from the audience, posting related gated content and driving paid and organic promotion both before and after the event. We staffed the live event with the idea of having enough people on hand to meet the immediate needs of our audience, which was critical to its success.
2. Find comfort in the uncomfortable. Jon and I happen to know one another pretty well (nearly 12 years), so there’s a comfort level between the two of us. Jon also knows that I don’t just warm up on cue…it takes time for me to hit my stride. For that reason, he insisted that we practice answering questions and sit together ahead of the event to loosen up before going live. It served as a warm up that helped ease me into the content once we went live. And after I was 15 minutes in, I felt like it was just a normal conversation between Jon and me (that five other Hodgers were in the room listening to).
3. Prepare filler content. We knew from past experience that people don’t all sign in at once, so we started the event with a little background information on Hodges and EOP before moving on to pre-submitted questions. This allowed us a branding and expertise opportunity for our early viewers while avoiding uncomfortable moments of having to beg our audience to submit a question.
4. Time is short and attention spans are shorter. While we had nearly 60 people watching at any given minute, the cast of characters changed throughout the hour-long segment. This is a consistent theme with live events – viewing is so convenient that it lends itself to multi-screening and even multi-tasking. To that end, make sure each point is short and digestible. Additionally, it means that it’s OK to be repetitive.

I can say with great certainty that Hodges has more of these in the works because it was an incredibly time-efficient, cost-effective and measurable way to engage with our community. If you’d like more tips about creating an event like this for your organization, feel free to reach out for details on our process or production tools.