Global News Publishers Find Success with Facebook LIVE

Since 1995, taff has been the premier lifestyle and gossip magazine within the ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE universe. Five evenings a week, taff hosts guide viewers through the hottest news and buzz of Hollywood, youth and pop culture – always with a wink.

The show creators wanted to ensure a benchmark position as the first entertainment magazine to use Facebook Live to interact with strategic audiences live and unfiltered. taff teased the Facebook Live event in advance via social channels, press releases, and on-air (TV) call-outs.

In May 2016, “taff uncut” launched with the goal to leverage Facebook Live in the most authentic way. Producers sent seven German influencers into Berlin’s nightlife scene, broadcasting their experiences directly to Facebook. Over six hours, the influencers stopped at several well-known locations in Berlin, such as the Brandenburger Tor, Checkpoint-Charlie, Oberbaumbrücke and Curry 36.

The Facebook Live event was shot via mobile phone, and structured as a relay race – the influencers met at predefined locations, where the new host(s) would take over the video and tell their part of the story. This format enabled users to authentically communicate with their idols and visit the key locations to become part of the live video. taff produced a best-of episode the Monday after the Facebook Live event in order to amplify the impact of the activation.

Broadcasting for more than 60 years, ITV News reaches millions of people every day, giving balanced, accessible reporting, exclusives and analysis from a top team of expert journalists.

On the night of the EU referendum result, ITV leveraged Facebook Live to to showcase conversation about the biggest vote in a generation. Their goal was to bring audiences closer to the political conversation by allowing them to engage with on-screen correspondents and high-profile figures, and to develop an informal, intimate form of news broadcasting to appeal to new audiences.

Throughout the evening of June 23rd and continuing into the early morning, ITV News used Facebook Live to share real-time results, provide instant analysis from ITV journalists, and offer the Facebook audience direct access to high profile figures discussing the vote.

The activation leveraged Facebook Live in three ways:

The results were outstanding: ITV News' 12 hours of Facebook Live videos on referendum night contributed to a higher than usual increase in likes for the ITV News Page as well as:

Eastern Broadcasting Company (EBC) is a cable TV broadcasting company in Taiwan with 8 leading TV channels. EBC News also has the leading Facebook Page in market, with 600 million monthly video views.

Facebook Live has been a very effective platform for EBC News to reach a global audience during real-time news events. In the context of disaster reporting, EBC sought to use Facebook Live to provide their audience with accurate real-time information as well as deep insights and immersive experiences.

Typhoon Nepartak caused huge damage to Taiwan on June 8th. During the storm's duration and aftermath, EBC News reporters in the north, middle, and south areas of Taiwan were brought together on Facebook Live to report on the situation. The EBC News central anchor fielded comments, questions and other information requests from the Facebook audience.

Using the Facebook Live API with their in-house video mixing equipment, EBC displayed six different feeds from the various reporters on location. This format allowed the Live audience to receive the latest information from the most impacted areas while staying in touch with the broader story. The 40-minute video is the first case of conducting a Facebook live with multiple screens.

EBC News saw a major lift in fans: 10,000 new people followed the Page on the day of the Facebook Live video. The broadcast resulted in:

Teletrece is a leading television newscast on a major network in Chile. They serve as a resource at the national and regional level, covering both breaking news and political news, business, general interest, and trends. They have been a constant innovator in promoting audience interaction.

Teletrece has been using Facebook Live as a platform to communicate in a direct way with fans and delve into newsworthy issues, both using the Facebook mobile app and the Live API. Their strategy is grounded in consistent, daily broadcasts, both in the newsroom and where the news is happening, either inside or outside of Chile — and always encouraging feedback loops from the viewing audience.

Teletrece's emphasis on consistency has positioned them well to cover breaking news in Cuba, Brussels, and Orlando.

Facebook Live has also been a proven tool to bring sports fans even closer to the action for wildly popular football events. After the final of the UEFA Euro 2016, Teletrece went live from Paris to show the post-game atmosphere, where hundreds of fans took to the streets to celebrate Portugal's win.

The Copa America Centenario, held in the U.S. in summer 2016, was an opportunity for special daily Facebook Live programming. Just before the final between Chile and Argentina, Teletrece went Live from a press conference in New York. And after the Chilean football team won the final match, Teletrece broadcast live using a drone to bring viewers to the celebration in Plaza Italia in Santiago.

The results were hugely positive, achieving a large number of interactions and questions, which were helpful in guiding future Live programming as well as posts on Teletrece's website. The Live from Paris saw 41,242 views, 93 shares and 261 comments. The Copa América Centenario press conference saw 26,570 views, 81 shares and 739 comments. The Live drone video in Santiago earned 2,356 shares and:

Firstpost is India’s premier digital platform for news, analysis and opinion. The website, which was launched in 2011, combines traditional tools of journalism with new narrative forms to provide readers critical perspective on the daily events that impact their lives.

On May 19, Indians in five states cast votes to elect leaders to the legislative assembly. During the counting of votes, Firstpost turned its newsroom, production facility and regional bureau into a “television studio,” broadcasting on its website and to Facebook Live from Guwahati, the NCR, Chennai, Trivandrum, Kottayam, and New Jersey. These multiple feeds were broadcast via the Facebook Live API, and were anchored by a host in Mumbai with additional inputs and commentary from a panel of experts in studio.

This exercise was the first of its kind in India. The coverage ran live and uninterrupted for four hours.

Nicola Porro is a journalist for Il Giornale, a daily newspaper in Italy, and the anchor for a televised talk show on Italian cable channel Canale 5.

Porro uses his Facebook Page to freely express his thoughts and opinions on significant news events and to increase his public reach by leveraging an interactive platform. “My strategy since the beginning has been focused on being live on Facebook.” He decided to have a daily morning broadcast in order to increase the loyalty of his audience. He has adopted an informal communication approach, less constructed than a traditional news broadcaster, to ensure a direct and unfiltered connection with the public.

Additionally, he posts videos of relevant events he covers in the field, including interviews with important personalities, to broaden and enrich the content posted.

This year's coverage of Brazilian elections was refurbished by RedeTV! to include the live audience on Facebook and experiment with new interactive tools. In RedeTV's innovative initiative in partnership with UOL, VEJA and Facebook, debates between candidates for the municipalities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte - capitals of the three largest Brazilian metropolitan regions - were broadcast simultaneously on Facebook and TV.

Using the Live API, they broadcast the same feed on their Facebook Page as on TV. In addition, RedeTV! created exclusive content for their Facebook audience before the debates and during TV commercial breaks. A reporter from RedeTV! shared real-time data collected from audience comments with the Telescope API. With this strategy, the Page was able to provide additional content and retain audience attention during the breaks. Based on demographics data registered on Facebook in the past two months, they were able to create a profile of the inhabitants in each region and the main themes they were discussing. Those insights were used by journalists to provide greater context for the questions posed to the candidates.

TechCrunch Disrupt New York was the first major media conference to be broadcast in full on Facebook Live. The TechCrunch social team had three goals: to expose new audiences to Disrupt, to help loyal TechCrunch readers that could not attend the conference feel like they were at the event, and to send new and returning users to TechCrunch.com for expanded coverage.

TechCrunch went “all in” on a distributed content strategy, says Director of Audience Development Travis Bernard, with Facebook Live being the main focus. Before Facebook Live existed, TechCrunch relied on recap videos to reach their social audience. For Disrupt New York in May 2016, they leveraged a combination of video on-demand as well as raw and polished Live video to give users different ways to experience the show. “You can attract larger audiences by serving up multiple formats of video and catering to different segments.”

They saw incredible success, with 500,000 views coming while Live, in addition to record levels of unique visitors to TechCrunch.com. This led to a second effort to broadcast to Facebook Live for Disrupt San Francisco in September 2016, which improved upon the initial performance, outstripping viewership on other streaming platforms.

TechCrunch worked with a third party vendor, Telescope, to bring interactivity to the Facebook Live format. They took votes from the audience during their popular “Startup Battlefield”—giving their audience the opportunity to feel like they were driving the events on stage. They also used Telescope to create text overlays to help give context to what panelists and presenters were discussing, even if people were watching with sound turned off.

For an event or conference, it's important to time programming to reflect the experience of people on Facebook Live. For example, TechCrunch built 5 minute breaks into the event programming in order to switch out the Live streams. At the time of the event, Facebook had a 90 minute cap on live videos, so the streams were divided into multiple videos. Similarly, it took viewers time to understand that they could vote on presentations, but by the second day of the 3-day conference, the votes started coming in in larger quantities. Regular call-outs during the live video, to remind viewers who had just joined about what was happening, also emerged as a best practice.