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While RPM has previously written about the benefits of live video-sharing platform Periscope, it looks like Facebook is set to change the way people produce and share video content with the development of Facebook Live.
At Facebook’s annual F8 Conference in early April, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said video content will see the biggest shift in the way people share and communicate, similar to the shift in mobile technology.
“We’re also at the beginning of a golden age of live online video; people watch live videos longer and they comment more than 10 times as much as on regular videos,” he said.
Stepps founder Josh Cobb said Facebook’s development of Live symbolises the company’s ambition to become the number one online video provider by overtaking YouTube.
“That’s where the investment on Facebook’s behalf is going at the moment and that means they’re adding so many features into their video platform that it makes it very easy for real estate sales people and business owners to market their business,” he said.
“I think it’s a really powerful tool from a thought leadership perspective – so market updates are important, but not so much just listed or just sold or testimonials, because no one really cares about that stuff on Facebook.”
Mr Cobb said real estate businesses shouldn’t wait too long to jump on Facebook Live, since it’s likely to become ‘pay to play’ once the platform becomes more popular and established.
“Now is the time to start looking at it, finding out how it’s going to work for your business, and then leverage that while you can and while it’s still very inexpensive to use that platform,” he said.
“Make no mistake about it, Facebook will monetise it and limit its organic reach like they’ve just done with Instagram and they did with Facebook ages ago.”
Greg Pearson from Professionals Albany started using live video-sharing platform Periscope in early September 2015 and was averaging two videos per week until moving on to Facebook Live.
“Facebook Live is definitely something very new for us and our foray into it so far has simply been providing some tips to property investors on how to identify a good property manager,” he said.
“What we are going to be doing is basically what we’ve been doing on Periscope with virtual property tours; so we’ve moved away from Periscope and we’re slowly integrating that over onto the Facebook Live platform.”
According to Mr Pearson, live streaming tours allow for interaction between potential tenants and property managers, which is what he hopes to achieve with Facebook Live in the coming months.
“We’ll be encouraging potential tenants to put questions forward like, if they missed something, then asking us to go back, and all that sort of thing,” he said.
“With the video we’ve done so far, we had people jump on and look at it, but there was no interaction there, so that’s something we need to work on; look at how we can perhaps create questions along the way so there’s some better interaction there as well.”
[Related: Innovative PMs adopting new client and tenant strategy]
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