Random musings: Zoom!

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Zoom!

Yesterday I talked about secret Facebook groups and today I'm going to talk about what you can put in them.

One of the main things you'll want to put in your group is videos...whether a video of your opportunity, or testimonial videos, or anything else that will interest your members.

There are several ways that you can create a video for your FB group, but I'm only going to talk about three of them: Facebook Live, BeLive and Zoom.

Luckily, Medium reviewed all three of these and compared the features:

Conducting live-streaming interviews natively on Facebook is the easiest and the cheapest option. However, it is not without shortcomings.

Facebook Live by itself is good for a simple video. You can also also share your screen directly from FB Live. But according to Medium:

Ugly layout with the host in the center of your screen and the guest appearing in a small box on the right top corner of the screen, as you can see from the image below. If you don’t have a tripod and are using your hand to hold your phone, any movement can cause the little box of your guest to block your face, which happened to me several times. In fact, one time, I had someone tell me in the comment section that my guest was blocking my face. Definitely not a pleasant layout especially if you have people watch the replay.

Next up is Zoom. This is the one I've seen the most. Zoom has:

A nice split screen layout between the host and the guest.

There are some cons with Zoom:

Cost. Pretty expensive to use. The feature that allows you to record your interviews and to do Facebook live streaming at the same time costs about $50 a month. To me, that is not cheap.

Complicated to set up.

I haven't personally tried Zoom but I have used BeLive a couple of times:

Cheaper. Cost $20 per month

Although, you can do two 20 minute broadcasts per week from the free account, but you can't do screen shares with a free account.

BeLive has a nice-looking caption for each person’s name (See BeLive Image 1). When you use Zoom, the host’ and the guest’s names are so small that they’re barely readable. See Zoom Image 1 above. The names are at the right left corner of the screen. Can you spot them?

BeLive also lets you share comments on the screen:

Another nice feature is that you can schedule your broadcasts and BeLive will share a link to your Facebook feed to promote your broadcast.

So, add some videos to your secret Facebook group, whether directly from FB Live, or with tools like Zoom or BeLive, and make your group into a virtual hotel room presentation!