At the end of October, Facebook launched a big ad campaign to increase awareness and promote Facebook Live. Facebook ran these ads on TV, digital billboards and within their newsfeed. Facebook Live is quickly gaining momentum—especially with marketers and advertisers. On November 22, Facebook also announced they are now testing real-time ads for Facebook Live, allowing you to push your live video out to users beyond your current audience.

So how can higher education use Facebook Live as a medium to build awareness, increase engagement and boost enrollment? We took a few minutes to catch up with Sam Harp, Senior Director of Strategic Communications and Marketing at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who has been using Facebook Live as an awareness and admissions tool.

CC: How have you been using Facebook Live to date?

SH: We’ve used Facebook Live primarily in two ways:

The first is for Q&A sessions with admissions; we’ve done three so far. These have been great ways to directly interact with our prospective students and answer questions many members of the audience share. As an admissions marketing tool, Facebook Live has been very easy to use—and it definitely helps that it’s free.

The second is for marketing and expanding the existing webcast audience. We have a series at the Harvard Chan School called the Forum, which does semi-regular live webcasts on a variety of topics. We use a third-party software solution called Wirecast to connect these webcasts to Facebook Live.

CC: What goals are driving your Facebook Live topics?

SH: With the Forum events, topics are all current issues in the public health field. We use Facebook Live to increase our online audience for these events, expand awareness of scientific findings and extend brand awareness. The central communications office at Harvard has also focused heavily on Facebook Live, so the main University accounts use their reach to amplify events from other schools.

For admissions events, the key is prospective student recruitment, engagement and ultimately conversion. Facebook Live has turned out to be a powerful tool for reaching a large number of prospective students at once, while also adding a more personal touch to the admissions process.

CC: What does the planning and promotion process for Facebook Live events look like?

SH: Admissions Q&A sessions don’t take much planning. We just pick a date, time and location. We do some advance promotion on email, social media and the website, then we point the camera at our director of admissions, who has all the expertise you could ask for on the admissions process, and let him answer the questions that come in.

We usually pull a couple of questions from the admissions inbox to get this rolling. We use a staff member’s cell phone as our camera and the Facebook Page Manager app to push out our live feed. The only piece of equipment we had to buy was a small cell phone holder, which we mounted on a monopod for stability.

Promotion of all of our Facebook Live events includes email marketing targeting specific audiences and some advance promotion on social media. We also create a graphic for each event and post this prominently on our website.

CC: How would you suggest schools get started with Facebook Live? (strategies, tips, FYIs)

SH: The most basic step is understanding why you’ll be using it and how you’ll be using it. What goal are you hoping to accomplish? Additionally, it’s important to focus on the “live” element. What will differentiate the Facebook Live event from another video? When planning an event, audience engagement should be a key factor: What will you do to solicit questions? How will you take questions? Who’s monitoring and asking the questions? How many will you take? Make sure audience members know you want their questions!

I’ve already covered equipment, but another tip involves timing. As with anything else, consider when your audience is online and when they’re most likely to watch an event and engage with it. For us, evenings have worked best, while midday has been difficult.

CC: What audience has engaged the most with Facebook Live?

SH: Prospective students. There’s a good mix of engagement across demographics, including geographic. We’ve seen viewers from the U.S., Canada, UK, Asia and beyond.

CC: What are your KPIs? How are you measuring success and ROI?

SH: We’re looking at views and engagement (specifically questions asked). With regard to views, we are often breaking that down to see exactly how long people are watching.

For example, we’ll break it down by viewers who watched 25%, 50%, 75% and the full video and when they’re dropping off. Since we’ve invested less than $20 and a modest amount of staff time, I can say we’re very pleased with the ROI.

How else should higher education be using Facebook Live?

Try doing a Q&A with a notable alumnus or professor about something that ties to the news cycle. Live stream from an existing event. Interview a student. Get creative! Are you using Facebook Live or interested in testing out a campaign? Reach out to me, hayley@convergeconsulting.org, to discuss your ideas.