Month: September 2019

Facebook allows you to live stream all kinds of content, from your daily life to creative artwork and even showing off your gaming skills. This article will show you how to go live on Facebook.

From your Mobile Device

The simplest way to start a Facebook live stream is in the palm of your hand. You can go live directly from the Facebook app on your mobile device. When inside the app, click on the camera icon and then click on the live option. You will need to set where your live stream will be posted along with adding a description to your live stream.

You can also add fun effects like masks for your face and different backgrounds. Once everything is configured to your liking, click on the start live video button. Live streaming on Facebook requires a lot of bandwidth, so it is recommended to connect your phone to wifi for streaming or you will use a lot of your mobile data.

From your Web Browser

You can also live stream to Facebook directly from your web browser. Go to your Facebook profile and in the section where you can write a new post, you’ll see an option for live video.

You will be prompted to allow Facebook to access your webcam and microphone. Once permission is given, you will be taken to a window where you can set the details for your live stream post. You can even share your desktop if you want to broadcast your gameplay or creative works. If you have a compatible browser like google chrome, you can install a plugin that will allow Facebook to broadcast your desktop.

This is a great way to start sharing live stream content on Facebook, however, you will be limited in the amount of customization you’ll be able to add to your stream to make it stand out. If you plan to broadcast gameplay, the desktop capture won’t allow you to stream silky smooth 60 fps gameplay.

Creating professional or gaming streams on Facebook

If you’re looking to start a streaming career on Facebook Gaming or just want to create professional Facebook streams, then you will need to use broadcasting software like XSplit Broadcaster. The XSplit team has worked closely with the Facebook live stream team to create the easiest method of producing high-quality live streams. XSplit Broadcaster allows you to capture your games in Full HD and with the highest frame rates. You can also add a variety of production elements to your broadcast, such as web-based overlays, capture cards connected to professional cameras and switch between different scenes.

To set up a Facebook live stream with XSplit Broadcaster, click on the broadcast menu, set up a new output and click on Facebook Live.

A window will pop up that will prompt you to log in to your Facebook account.

While logging in, you may be asked which pages you wish to give XSplit permission to broadcast to on Facebook.

Once you have authorized XSplit to broadcast to Facebook, you will need to set the details for your stream. First, select if you wish to stream to your Timeline or a specific Facebook page. Next, select the resolution and frame rate for your stream. A recommended starting point for gaming streams is 720p at 60fps. Next, select the encoder for your broadcast, most streams use x264, but this will require a beefy CPU for a full HD high frame rate broadcast. If you have an NVIDIA or AMD GPU installed, it is recommended to use their respective hardware encoders namely VCE and NVENC. Finally set the bitrate, it is recommended to keep the bitrate in the green section so that your viewers won’t encounter any buffering while watching your stream.

Once you click start streaming, an additional window will pop up where you will input the details for your Facebook live stream post. If you plan to be visible on Facebook Gaming, make sure to set the title of the game you will be playing. If you plan to stream to Facebook Live for more than 4 hours, make sure to enable “continuous live”. Click on start broadcast and you will now be live streaming to Facebook!

While you are streaming to Facebook, XSplit Broadcaster will give you status updates on the health of your stream at the top of the program. The most important section to monitor is “dropped frames”.

Dropped frames can occur for a variety of reasons, but the most common is that you set your bitrate too high and your internet doesn’t have enough upload bandwidth. To change your bitrate, click on the broadcast menu and right-click on your Facebook channel. This will open a window where you can adjust your bitrate.

How do I let people know I am streaming on Facebook?

Now that you know how to live stream on Facebook, you are going to want to get people watching. First, make sure that your live stream post is set to public so it will appear on your timeline as well as others. If you are streaming to a Facebook page, it is recommended to share the live stream post on your personal timeline so that family, friends, and colleagues can tune in. Make sure to keep a consistent stream schedule so people will know when to drop by your page or profile. If you will be streaming games, make sure to set which game you will be playing so that people can easily find you when searching for whichever games they wish to watch. Finally, be sure to promote your Facebook live stream on all your social media channels.

One of the hardest things to deal with when you start streaming is not having a chat to interact with. When you have zero viewers or even a few that aren’t chatting, it can be hard to keep up the motivation to be entertaining. It can be even harder to figure out how to be entertaining. We here at XSplit want to help you with your broadcasting career by offering some tips on how you can find your voice as a new streamer or a content creator!

Talk about the game

While this may seem obvious, this is really the cornerstone of broadcasting games. However, instead of just doing play by play, talk about various aspects or details about the game. If you’re playing a single-player game you can talk about where you think the storyline is going, who is your favorite character, or if it is a retro game, what you were doing when that game was released. If it is a multiplayer game, you talk about your strategies or get hype about impressive plays. While a bit risky, you can have some fun conversations using proximity chat or chatting with random players you end up in a party with.

Stream with your friends and/or family

When you start streaming, it is recommended to share your stream on all your social media, including personal accounts. Your first viewers will likely be people you know, but at least you will have people in chat you are comfortable talking to and can give you topics to bounce off of in chat. The same goes for having a group call running with your friends. Dead air can be filled with conversations between your friends.

Write down topics for each stream

Streaming is great in the sense that you can talk about whatever you want, whenever you want, but sometimes it helps to have a few jumping-off points. If you stumble upon an interesting story or have something funny happen to you, write it down on your phone and talk about it during the stream. This is a great way to coax people to participate in the chat since everybody has an opinion on something.

Ask your viewers questions

Prioritizing chat interactivity is great for retaining viewers and making them feel part of a community. You can spur interaction by asking your chat questions like their favorite food or anime. One of the best tactics is to ask your viewers what game you should play or what decision you should make in the game. You may get crickets the first few times, but eventually, someone won’t be able to resist the urge to be a backseat gamer.

Check your analytics

Many of the streaming platforms, such as Twitch, give you detailed analytics showing if and when you had chat activity. If you see a period with a lot of chat activity, check your archive and try to determine what you were doing to drive that activity.

Shout out the lurkers

Your first viewers may not be the chatty type for a number of reasons. However, it is always good to make them feel welcome and part of your growing community by giving them shoutouts every so often. They may even decide to chat after a time!

Be your best self

While being yourself is better than being someone you’re not, what you are aiming to do is to highlight and amplify the most entertaining aspects of your personality. While this is subjective and probably will take the longest time to figure out, usually your friends and family can tell you what they like about you.

If all else fails, play a scary game

People love watching other people get scared while playing video games. Many of the largest content creation empires have been built on this simple notion.

Developing your casting skills for gaming can be a long path, but always remember to try to have fun. If you’re starting your Twitch or YouTube channel as a hobby or new career, it’ll be hard to keep creating if you’re dreading starting a stream.

Do you have any tips on how to get comfortable with the microphone? Let us know in the comments below or on social media (XSplit on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube).

Do you create content on YouTube and you want to improve your searchability ranking? You know, we can’t all keep track of all the algorithm changes when it happens – it’s totally out of our control, what we can do as creators is to make sure that our content can easily be searched and optimized for search engine results.

There are many factors that can affect your searchability ranking in this platform. With great content comes great responsibility, in making sure that you have enough information attached to the video that you’re uploading to the internets.

As a content creator, I also struggle with SEO aka “search engine optimization”. But, what does SEO have to do with YouTube? Whether if you’re creating content for fun or for educational purposes – getting more views and people to see it is our main goal. How do you get your content to more people without paying money to boost it? Simple, optimizing it for searchability. Your content has to possess certain words within the title, description and… and…

No need to feel overwhelmed, here are some things that we do to make sure that you can easily search and watch our content.

When you click the upload button, you can already set the visibility of your video – you can set it to public right away if you don’t have a set schedule or schedule it anyway if you have the timeline. You can also set it to private and change the visibility whenever you feel like it.

Okay, now for the good stuff.

Always check your title

The title has to have the essence of what your content is about – does not need to have too many words, it needs to be precise and concise with no bullsh*t nor clickbait-y words (if possible) that deter to the content of the video. It should clearly summarize what it is about and what the audience can expect from it.

Create an informative description

From the title, the audience has gathered more or less the essence of what the video will be about. Here is where you can do in-depth with your description, you can add your sources and references as well. You do know that on the internet that plagiarism is quite rampant and you don’t what to be that person who does not give credit when it is due, right?

Create a thumbnail

Let’s get visual. We all know that people don’t like reading stuff on the internet, they prefer to listen and see whatever is on the content. Here’s where the thumbnail comes into play. It has to be visually appealing, not overly decorated. It has to have an impact and an outlook on what your content is about. It needs to have something that will have people linger on the visual or take a second glance. The more people you get to stop and look at your thumbnail, the more likely are they to click and watch it, does that one make sense?

Don’t forget the tags

Tags are, to put simply, keywords whereby one searches on the engine to look for certain topics or content pertaining to the keyword.

Add it to the appropriate playlist

Adding your videos to a playlist is crucial when you want to segregate your content into categories. It makes it easier for your audience to watch more content of the same category at one go.

Optionals but good to have

The End screen

If you have more time to spare, add a few more elements at the end of the video to direct your audience to another video or playlist. This ensures that they get sucked into the youtube playlist-video loop rabbit hole, if you know what I mean.

Annotation cards

Ever wondered what the little “i” icon on the top right of the video means? We know it as annotations, where you can add a website link or video to direct your audience to another content – this is especially helpful for those who might not be interested in the current video they’re watching and might want to switch to a new one. This you can direct the audience to a video of your own, making them still stay on your channel for a period of time.

Closed captions

This feature brings in more possibilities for a wider audience. Yes, sure you have a dedicated audience that can understand your content with your native language but – someone else from another nationality could’ve been looking for the same content but they might not understand it due to the language barrier. Having closed captions or translated subtitles can be a hassle to work with for every video but it does pay ten-folds in the long run.

Call to action within the video

Use a call to action within the video, usually, content creators add it to their intros and video outros. Here’s an example:

Hey friends! Welcome to the channel if you’re new, hello I’m (insert name here) and I usually upload (what content you usually create on the platform and your schedule, if there’s any). If you’re a returning subscriber, welcome back! For today’s episode, you’ll be (insert a quick summary of content) and if you’re interested in these kinds of videos consider subscribing and click the bell button to get notified every time I upload.

I hope that this helps you a bit with improving your YouTube searchability ranking. If you have other tips not mentioned above, please let us know in the Disqus comments and in our socials.

In recent years we’ve seen the popularity of streaming reach a record high, with the expansion of streaming platforms and the evolution of social websites into offering streaming services for their users.

Facebook Gaming, for one, has grown in popularity since June of 2018; a seemingly big challenge to streaming platforms like Twitch, Mixer, and YouTube – to offer the same platform with the ability to stream easily without leaving the comfort of the website. Recently, Twitch and Discord have announced the impending launch of their own streaming abilities to their followers.

From the front runners of streaming software, XSplit alongside OBS and many more – has sparked a debate of whether content gets uploaded online or you do a live broadcast. With the growing popularity and demand for visually appealing and accessible content – video more than anything has possessed the top ranking for the most likely candidate to entice viewers to linger more, consuming content more than the average image or status posts. Doing live broadcasts or streaming, in general, have its pros and cons. Here are some of the pros that might get you into streaming your content this 2019.

As a (low-key) content creator like myself, there is an existing struggle to create online content consistently as we fight against the algorithm – YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and etc. have ‘em and we have to be consistent in uploading content to make sure that our audiences see it. So, why choose streaming over the usual “plan, edit and upload” cycle.

It’s innovating and creative

Just like normal online video content, it takes a lot of innovating and creativity to make sure that your content is different from the rest. It’s a challenging endeavor but also a rewarding one when you formulate your own style and presentation. More than the visuals, it also takes a lot of personality and charisma to attract and maintain a following. That makes streaming so enticing, it’s so fascinating to see more than just characters on screen but seeing personalities IRL.

Engaging and interactive

I’m not saying that the usual upload content is not engaging nor interactive – depending on what kind of content you might have, live broadcasts are more interesting and entertaining than the usual video content. As you stream, a variety of emotions and reactions cannot be faked or recreated. At the same time, the kind of engagement and interaction varies because audiences can be different for every stream.

Time-sensitive

The hype dies down if you’re not in the moment yourself, the interaction is simply too interesting to pass out for a replay run of the stream. Someone might feel an instant FOMO (fear of missing out) when you miss the streaming session itself. It’s never the same emotions when you’re on a live broadcast and interacting with the audience and merely seeing their comments/ reactions and engaging after. Be there when it happens as it happens, exclusive content and experience on every stream.

It’s fun

No two streams are the same – which makes it more exciting and fun. You have a different mix of audiences every time you do your live broadcast which makes every session interesting. Some might be outspoken, some might be more technical on the way you stream, it can be any mix of personalities.

If there’s anything you want to share with us and the XSplit Community, don’t forget to join our official Discord server here: discord.gg/xsplit and follow us on our socials. For any technical and account related questions, chat with us at xsplit.com/support