From the course: Delivering Video to Facebook Live

What is Facebook Live? - Facebook Tutorial

From the course: Delivering Video to Facebook Live

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What is Facebook Live?

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- Before we dig into the how, let's take a quick moment to evaluate what exactly Facebook Live is. It's a relatively new platform and I'd like to give you a little bit of information to help you better understand it. Facebook Live is a recent invention of Facebook that is targeted initially at businesses, but then quickly expanded to be available to all Facebook users. Now you'll be able to access Facebook Live from a variety of places, but it's also a good idea if you have a business to log in to the Business Manager where you'll get a little bit of additional control after the livestream. When you're logged in as well, it's helpful if you set up on the Business Manager any settings needed so you can also boost posts and advertise. These are useful things that will allow you to connect with people and to promote the livestream before it happens. Now when you're on a business page, you'll be able to access Facebook Live by just clicking the Start a Live Video button. It's going to be attached to a post or available under the video section. You'll also find a similar option available on personal pages which we'll look at in a moment. After the fact, your livestreams will become available and you'll see them listed in the video library. You'll also see from the video library the ability to add a live video and to schedule it in advance so that people know when to attend. When you go to set up a livestream, you'll be faced with two options, whether you want to connect immediately using the built-in camera on your device or if you're on a desktop computer, you can connect a professional streaming software package. This will use things like a real-time media stream and allow you to actually connect either another computer or a dedicated piece of hardware so you can livestream to Facebook. And it can be then scheduled so that people can actually see the content, add it to their calendars, and get a reminder when you are ready to go live. That's the business case, but it's also quite simple to just access this right from a regular page or even your mobile device as a casual user. Now when you're ready to go live, you'll be able on a personal page just to click the Live Video button and this will connect to your computer and give you the ability to generate a livestream. You see in this case, the camera on my laptop has become available and I can actually target different cameras if connected as well as multiple microphones if connected. We'll explore this option a little bit later. Going live on Facebook is as simple as clicking a button or as complex as a multi-panel, multi-camera, multi-system setup that allows you to really tie things together into a professional broadcasting studio that just happens to be connected to Facebook. We'll explore all of those workflows in this course, but it's important to note that Facebook designed this platform to be easy. Now I think they learned a little bit from YouTube and Google when they did the Google Hangouts which initially were designed for consumers and then grew into the business space. Facebook knows that it makes its most money and has a lot of stake in the game to actually work with businesses and give them tools that they need so Facebook Live connects very well to business pages and supports a wealth of third party add-ons that business users might enjoy or can use to better connect and advertise to their audience, but it's also simple enough for a grandmother and a granddaughter to connect and have a conversation. So throughout this course, we'll explore mostly professional workflows, but you'll learn different ways to easily access Facebook Live and to have a great conversation that has high-quality video and high-quality audio for a good experience on both ends.

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