Why I Use Facebook Live (with my Business Page!):

• I had spent a few years nurturing and growing the audience there already
• my audience hangs out on Facebook
• more shareability/virality
• viewers are nicer (fewer trolls in general)
• links are easy, and you can use as many as you want (both in the description, the comments, and in your "pinned comment")
• the Pinned Comment
• the Video Description
• content can live on my Page forever
• I can run ads to the stream after it ends
• I can schedule streams (if I stream from my desktop) in advance
• I can build custom audiences based on view % and engagement
• I can see crazy detailed analytics in "video insights"

Some Cons:

• no landscape mode currently for Pages (mobile app for managing and livestreaming from your Facebook Business Page) *update 4/9/20: it is now possible again to go live from "Pages" app in landscape mode*
• landscape mode requires more tech
• Facebook discourages multistreaming
• no split-screen or "go live with" (natively, possible using OBS)*

Do future-you a favor, and please start using a Facebook Business Page for all your Facebook stuff from now on.

You may not fully understand yet why you’re doing it, but if you have any desire to make data-based business decisions in the future, you have to have done this.

If you're feeling panicky about it for some reason, don't worry about it too much. Just set up your Business Page, use it, install your FB Pixel, and let the Facebook machine start to collect data for you as you ramp up your knowledge of how to use that data.

If your feathers get ruffled about how Facebook doesn't show your content to a big enough percentage of your Page Likes.... get over it?

We were fortunate to have all that wild-west time of free advertising in the earlier days of Facebook. Currently, Facebook Lives are pretty well supported in Newsfeed when it comes to visibility, so we're getting some helpful boosts from it in our followers' feeds at present (for free).

BTW - the more you can get people to organically engage with the content on your Page, the more they will organically see future posts. (So here's another tough-love lesson for you... create better content?)

Lastly, even when you do use paid advertising on Facebook, it is typically less expensive and more effective (if you know what you're doing) compared to other advertising platforms, so "quit yer bitchin'" and learn to make it work for you. :)

*I mention throughout this course that you cannot "split-screen" on FB Live. When I say that, I mean "natively." It is possible using OBS. If you're planning to do this, definitely enable the Crossposting feature on all parties' Pages so that it will be available for viewing by all Artists' audiences.

Another note for the rest of this course...

I'm a Mac and iOS user, primarily using Facebook Live broadcasting from my iPhone without a lot of other tech involved (though I did try some different things first), so I'll be referring to matters in that context for the most part.

Performance-wise, I'm a singing-guitarist, so I'm looking at all this primarily through that lens. If I am referring to performance stuff, please bridge the gap for yourself and determine how the advice fits your scenario.