Facebook‘s live feature gives business, advertisers, and regular users the ability to share videos with their intended audience live. This is a great way to show your followers an inside look at your business, promote products, and increase user interaction with your business over Facebook. Below are five major updates Facebook has added to their live video feature.
- 4 Hour Streams – Facebook live has had a limit to how long a user can stream a video for since it launched. This limit was 90 minutes. Now Facebook is allowing users to stream up to four hours of video, when broadcasting using the Facebook app, as the popularity of Facebook Live has increased.
- Hide Reactions & Comments – Although this is a great platform to get your business exposed to your audience and increase interactions, the internet is the internet. By that, we are talking about internet trolls. In order to keep the live feed professional, Facebook is giving the option of hiding comments and reactions on Facebook Live. This will lower distraction rate as well as spam. In order to do this, you swipe right to hide and swipe left to bring back comments and reactions.
- Full Screen – This update gives the viewers the opportunity to view the live video in full screen. A much better alternative to view from the small box that has been around since the launch of Facebook Live.
- Continuous Stream – For businesses such as zoos and museums, this update will allow your stream to be continuous. The only issue is that your followers will not be notified once the video is live. Another catch is that once the stream finally stops, it is gone for good. If people want to see what was on the video they have to watch the stream live.
- Targeting – This option is probably the biggest for businesses and advertisers. This is because Facebook is giving broadcasters the opportunity to have audience restrictions on their live streams. You can now target people by their gender, age (minimums and maximums can be set), as well as by location. Now your live streams can be viewed by the audience you originally intended to get the best return on investment.