I went live on Facebook every day in February, 2018.

Why?

Firstly, to prove to myself that I could. It was a bit of a personal challenge; I’d never been live on our business page before, yet I’m always encouraging our clients to go live.

Plus, I wanted to challenge myself to talk about social media strategy for restaurants and coffee shops consistently, accept questions, and prove to myself that I really do know what I’m talking about.

I went in with the expectation to keep the videos 5 minutes or less, but most videos were between 7-9 minutes long. I know for myself, watching shorter videos is always better than long ones.

The results of 28 days of live video were pretty interesting, actually.

A little unexpected. I wanted to share some figures, first.

Across 28 videos, these were my averages:
Live viewers: 4
Reach: 244
Reactions and Comments: 104
Engagement Rate: 42%

Consider that 1% engagement is generally considered “good” on Facebook business pages, I think this is pretty stellar.

There’s a few things I want to address, though.

My highest live viewers at any time was 8. This happened 4 times, on the introduction video, my civil service background, an interview I did about business mindset, and on a video where I got trolled.

Coincidentally, other than the video I got trolled on (I’ll talk about this in a minute!), my introduction video performed the best. Other top performing videos were all about me, my background, and what I’m like to work with.

I’ve been thinking about why this is. People were either curious about what I was going to be talking about, they haven’t heard from me in awhile (I did really recede from a lot of people after OmNoms closed), and general nosiness took over. Or, people just generally liked to listen to me chatter on about myself, because they think I’m awesome. Both options are probably fairly accurate!

I was a little disheartened that my viewership was so low on what I actually wanted to talk about. However, I’m not going to be discouraged! The purpose of my challenge was to do it and get this information out there, and I wholeheartedly succeeded in that! I’ve made this content and, for the most part, it’s evergreen. Meaning, I can re-purpose this again and again. In fact, I’m building a free course around it! 

Highlights of going live…

Some highlights for me were when I got trolled. I’ve looked into what happened, and there’s actually a group set up on Facebook to seek out people’s lives and chat about couches. It’s a thing, it’s totally weird, but I spoke with some people after it happened who were a bit jealous that I got the couch trolls when they didn’t. So, even though we deleted all the comments from this, I’m actually kind of chuffed it happened! It did totally skew my engagement results though – huge reach with very little interaction.

The other highlight was when The Happy Pear, a restaurant and social media movement based in Ireland, liked and commented on one of my videos. I was totally fangirling and excited about that. It furthers my opinion on organic and relationship marketing; building relationships can sometimes have a bigger impact than paid ads! Plus, now I know that their whole brand is awesome and even chats with smaller accounts. 

Final thoughts…

Overall, I’m so, so glad that I set and completed this challenge for myself! I’m so much more confident on camera and on social media strategy. Each day of the challenge found me proving to myself that I am in the right industry and really know what I’m talking about.

I think live video is becoming such a saturated market, though. Because reach and engagement is so high with it, everyone is doing it, which – don’t get me wrong – is awesome! But at the same time, totally overwhelming.

Would I do this kind of every day challenge again? No, probably not. But I will use live video for Thankful Cow Solutions in the future and I wholeheartedly encourage you to add it to your marketing strategy!

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Amanda Sloan is a Social Media Strategist at Thankful Cow Solutions and a blogger at Bean & Backpack. She’s a lover of restaurants, coffee shops, and nutrition. You’ll find her talking and writing about social media, vegan food, travel, specialty coffee, and positive mindset.

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