Broadcasting Live Through Facebook!

This evening I did a first - I did a live broadcast within Facebook! In other words, I used my webcam and microphone to record and live stream myself interviewing my son. It was actually a lot easier to do than I thought. Within Facebook, all you have to do to live stream yourself is to click on "Live Video" where you normally post thoughts or links. And then you have the option of choosing whether your live stream is for the public, friends, family, or just yourself. I chose my Facebook friends because a few hours and minutes before the broadcast I let people know what we would be doing. Since I had previously attended a Facebook Live broadcast, I was already familiar with the format and how to interact with the viewers. So, before our broadcast, I asked viewers to submit any questions they might want me to add to the interview with my son. And two of my Facebook friends (both hundreds of miles away) submitted two, which I excitedly added to the questions.

For the interview itself, I brought my microphone and tested it in Garageband to make sure it worked, then did a test run 15min early with my son in Facebook Live to make sure everything worked as hoped. Since we had no problems and were even able to watch our live broadcast seconds after going offline, we knew it was going to work. We started live streaming 5 minutes early to catch any early birds and start getting warmed up with the interview. Then as friends and family started to view, we had fun with the interview and enjoyed adding a bunch of user-submitted questions, which I could view as people typed them. For me, it was a very fun experience seeing people join in and react to Cedar's responses, greet us, and submit questions.

I may do this again just for fun. But if I did, I think it would be more effective to have a more well-thought out topic to address rather than just random questions that don't relate completely with an audience. We usually didn't have more than 3 or 4 viewers at a time, and if I had advertised what was going to happen a day or two in advance that involved a topic near and dear to my Facebook friends, then I think we could have had more participation. But it was a good learning experience that I would definitely recommend to anyone else!

On a side note, we started this Facebook Live session off by saying "Duckett Live Channel 5." That was because I had made a few videos under that heading years ago before my wife and I had kids. If you want to be entertained with some silly "news" clips from years past, check out this video and more...