A Look into Facebook Live

Last Wednesday we had a guest speaker, Elizabeth Stevens, from the University of Missouri chat with our social media strategies’ class over Skype. Stevens works as a news editor for the Columbian Missourian, a community newspaper based out of the journalism school at the University of Missouri that is mostly staffed by students at the school. The newspaper reports mainly on community discourse, namely dealings with the city council and the schoolboard. Stevens works closely with the outreach team in which students and staff go out into the community and use social media to report on important events, recently incorporating the relatively new Facebook live feature in which videos can stream to an audience watching from their computers and phones.

Being a relatively new platform, there are still few analytics on Facebook live itself. According to Stevens, two-thirds of the views that occur on streamed videos occur after they are archived on the site itself. This means that while this platform allows for more engagement with the audience during the live feed, the public has yet to fully catch onto the trend. A live stream must be online for approximately ten minutes prior to accumulating the majority of their viewers. Analytics on retention rates of these users is still not well known.

While I believe this new feature shows a lot of promise, I believe that there is still a lot to work on so as to gain more viewers. I think it would be beneficial to collect more data regarding the retention rate of viewers to analyze how many click on the stream and stay for most of the time online. This will be a great feature to further explore for local reporting agencies as it will give a direct and unedited view into breaking news, allowing for more trust to build between the news and consumers.

#Facebook #Live #Analytics #Retention