[Editor’s Note: This feature asks communicators to spot trends and discuss their reactions to them. In this edition we hear from Anthony Gilroy, director of marketing & communications, Steinway & Sons, Americas.]
The Trend: In the first half of 2016, Facebook introduced live streaming, aka Facebook Live, allowing brands and individuals to reach out to their followers in an instant and very visual way. While this wasn’t the first time live streaming was available on social media, the huge audience and demographic reach of Facebook made its foray into this space instantly relevant. Facebook took steps to ensure the adoption of this new feature by letting every follower of every page/individual know when one of the people/brands they follow was live streaming. This makes your potential reach enormous.
The Response: At Steinway & Sons, we have used live streaming a number of times for events such as our Live From the Factory Floor concerts, where famous musicians play a short concert surrounded by Steinway workers in our factories. In the past, we’ve professionally recorded these, spent time and money editing them, and posted them online from there. While there is something to be said for the production quality you get in doing it that way, there are also benefits to live streaming, some intangible, others measurable. We’ve seen an increased reach, more total views and much more interaction via our live streams.
There is an excitement level to anything that is live that I believe in many cases outweighs the benefits of multiple cameras and slick production values. Certainly the idea of people stopping their work in our factories and standing around a piano as a great artist makes music lends itself to the informality of Facebook Live streaming. These informal events also can help humanize brands by providing behind-the-scenes experiences to followers.
Of course, there always will be a need for very well-produced and polished videos to help promote a brand, but particularly when it comes to things like PR events, the immediacy and authenticity of a live stream is very valuable.
Another key factor is the fact that, as mentioned, Facebook currently alerts all of your followers when a live stream is taking place. This is, in essence, free publicity.
As IBM’s Brandi Boatner said in PR News Pro last week, a lot of brands in 2016 got on board with Facebook Live. She believes this will increase in 2017. I agree. In fact, I expect that we will see exponential growth. I know that we are planning to be much more active and are factoring the possibility of a live stream into almost every notable public event we have, with our Steinway Artists and others.
We’ve continually seen situations where social media companies, such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc., will try to build audiences for brands and get them into the habit of using their services to communicate with their customers, only to later change algorithms and build in ways to monetize those services. I have no doubt that Facebook will begin to do the same with live streaming. So the time to maximize your cost/benefit proposition is now; I’d recommend that if you haven’t already, you consider how this can help you to get your brand or brands in front of more people this year.