How live is your brand?

About one year, I published an article titled, Your Streaming Live Brand. As smartphones got smarter and mobile data speeds made streaming as seamless as texting, it became apparent that brands are going to quickly need to have a “live brand strategy.” Last year, everyone was excited about Meerkat and Periscope (some still are). Regardless of how those platforms are performing, there is no doubt that Snapchat is growing by leaps and bounds. With that, Facebook is making big, brash and important bets in the live video space.

This is going to be a huge challenge for brands. 

Here’s what we know: Facebook is amping up many live video features. Instagram (which Facebook owns) now offers sixty second video clips. Both Facebook and Instagram are controlled by their proprietary algorithms. Because Facebook wants live video to happen (in a big way), they have already tweaked the news feed to deliver videos (and, more importantly, live ones) at the top of their user’s news feeds. So, in the old days, as brands would use popular keywords to game the search engines, now brands must use live video if they want some kind of organic placement at the top of the news feed (without paying for it).

Facebook is getting even more serious about live video.

Many more features and functionality are coming to Facebook’s video service. Almost all of them are related to live video. Facebook is sending us (all) a very serious message about where they are putting their energy, and how our traditional typed status updates are much more likely to become live video messages. Yesterday, Buzzfeed published a very in-depth article titled, Why Facebook And Mark Zuckerberg Went All In On Live Video. It’s a must-read. With that, here’s the question: how ready is your brand for live?

A more elegant question about Facebook and live video: does your brand have what it takes to be relevant in a world of live videos on Facebook?