My First FB Live on 'Coping with Social Change', Learnings & Recommendations

My relocation to India has not just been a personal learning curve but also been good for my professional exposure and experience. Yesterday, 17 May, 2020, I attempted to host a live session on Facebook (FB) for SuperParents, an initiative of Divyam Trust.

I prepared on a topic "Coping with Social Change", which was close to my heart and relevant to the new age parents. 

I learnt how to conduct FB live session, toggling between my laptop and mobile, to screen share my presentation online. The session was planned for 45 minutes including Q & A, and I managed to time check quite well. Thankfully I had prepared the visual cues and rehearsed the entire narration by self-recording. Being a weekend my spouse also obliged to sit in and observe my rehearsal, providing valuable improvement feedback to make my presentation style and flow of content more engaging with the target audience. Both of these helped me get through my first session with confidence and deliver my best for this maiden attempt. 

The entire live session is available on the SuperParents FB handle as three separate videos (Introduction, the main presentation and the Q & A). 

Having a budding digital artist in-house does have its own advantages. I enlisted my daughter's help to stitch the three videos into one full-length video, using KineMaster (adding watermark and snipping relevant portions and exporting options etc.).

So here is the stitched video that runs for about 45 minutes from start to end! 

With this experience, my recommendation to Solopreneurs/Mompreneurs/Homepreneurs & those who are part of the gig economy are:

1. Understand and leverage the Internet to your personal advantage starting with:
• Having profiles set up on at least the basic platforms - FB, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google. Depending on your target audience and the reach you would like to have, you can explore other options too including Twitter, TikTok, Youtube, etc.
• Familiarise yourself with the messengers of the above social media accounts and actively respond to messages that you receive. You never know when one of these might become your prospective client or a word-of-mouth marketer for the services you offer.
2. Using Mobile and Laptop to join and host online sessions
• Have the necessary plug-ins and tools downloaded and installed. Try them with your family and friends
• Any updates of the existing software that need to be done also have to be taken care of.
3. Know and familiarise with basic tools that are needed in today's world (Zoom, WebEx, FBLive, Hangouts/Meet, Microsoft Teams (Advanced users), Zoho social/meets.
4. Give adequate care to personal appearance as well, especially if you are conducting live video sessions. This is important because your appearance can impact the impression people have on you and if you are hosting a session on behalf of an organisation, then they also base their opinion about the host organisation as well on the basis of your appearance.
5. Invest in a good quality headset (with mute / noise cancelleation options, to cut-off unwanted noise in your background) and camera (with HD option). Helps in making professional streaming videos with good picture and voice quality.
6. Preparation is the key. Trying to make impromptu speeches live, may not be everybody's cup of tea.
7. Rehearse, Rehearse, and Rehearse - The importance of this cannot be emphasised enough. It helps you deal with time-checks, fog-on, browser & software issues and other non-verbal cues/fillers that might end up diverting focus from the point-in-discussion. E.g. In my case, because I rehearsed, I realised that the regular version of Google Chrome did not allow me to start a FB Live video from my laptop. I needed to download the beta version. I still need to understand why it was so, but doing it ahead of time helped me in being prepared with the necessary software for conducting the live on the scheduled date at the right time.