There’s some good news for those of you who love broadcasting live on Facebook. On January 11, Facebook announced a bunch of new features for Pages looking to go lie Based on the headliner, Facebook users will probably have the ability to broadcast live from your laptop. Facebook will enable Pages to air Live streams from the desktop web, which sounds pretty nice. The idea behind the live streaming on desktop is to make it easier to produce more professional broadcasts (think shaky camera work from your mobile phone).
Not only will it make it easier for Pages to produce live streams, but Facebook is currently rolling out a few features to help Pages to get people to tune in and interact with those live streams.
Pages will allow Page owners to affix comments to the bottom of a live broadcast, just like you can pin posts top their profile pages. Pages can use the comment-pinning option to highlight comments that might color people’s perceptions of a broadcast and serve as a prompt for others to weigh in on matters of topic within the broadcast. That pinned comment can partially crowd out the normal comment stream of people writing comments that broadcasters don’t want, such as “LOL” and “Hi.”
A live broadcast will appear at the top of the Pages’s video library page, which Pages can link to by using the URL “http://www.facebook.com/PAGENAME/videos” (replacing “PAGENAME” with their Page’s name).
Facebook is even adding some features of interest to brands hiring publishers or celebrities to produce branded live streams.
Pages allow people who aren’t Page admins to broadcast live from the Page’s account. An example drawn by Facebook included a news publisher’s Page having individual reporters broadcast on the ground at a breaking news event, but this “Live Contributor” option could be used by marketers that have hired a host of celebrities to attend a brand’s event and wants to easily enable the even from their vantage, but on the brand’s Page.
Another interesting option that Facebook is giving Page owners is the ability to syndicate the recordings of their live streams to other Pages, which is something Facebook enabled for normal videos last year.