Amanda recalls a time were she almost bored her viewers to death by over-prepping her Facebook Live videos.
It’s not uncommon to want to present the best and most informative information to your viewers when you decide to post content. However, over-prepping can actually be a bit detrimental to your online viewership.
In this week’s #FollowAttorneyAmanda, Amanda talks about some advice her partner gave her that caused her to lighten up the content on her Facebook Lives.
Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Attorney Amanda Shaffer. Today I want to talk about whether or not it’s a good idea to prep before live videos or not to prep. That is the question. I’ve gone back and forth on this issue. I started only with recorded videos. I didn’t do lives at the very beginning when I started doing social media marketing and some of those videos did get plenty of hits. I’ve had – they’d been up for about five years now. Some of them have 10,000 plus views and some of them still have less than a hundred. I’m sure it’s topic-specific, but I’ve tried to repeat some of those more popular topics in other tape videos and other live videos and didn’t have as much success. So I’m still trying to figure that whole thing out. But I bring up this topic because last night, my law partner, Aaron, and I did a What My series, “What You Really Want to Know” about reopening immigration proceedings. That’s because we’ve been getting a lot of questions, a lot of calls about things people are seeing that are being put forth in the marketplace that is not true.
So we wanted to address some of those issues. It wasn’t really a question and answer session as much, but it came about because I think it was last week or the week before – no, it was two weeks ago, the Biden administration put out a new memo on new immigration enforcement guidelines, which essentially go back to the way it was the last two years of when Obama was president. So a lot of people are thinking now that they can file for things when they can’t necessarily do it. The memo was 13 pages and it covered a wide variety of immigration matters. So what I did was I went through the memo when I outlined it for Aaron and myself and then I plan to outline what we were going to say based on the outline of the memo. But when I started making the order right before like – a couple of hours before we went live, Aaron was like, “That’s boring. No one’s tuning him for that.” And what he meant was explaining in detail what prosecutorial discretion is, and things like that, which like that was what this was about, so we had to give a general overview, but we didn’t have to go into all these details. But I still wanted the details in case we were asked questions about it.
This is how I normally prepare for our question and answer sessions or our “What You Really Want to Know” lives, pretty much all our lives except for the game show because I don’t have to prepare different things for that. Obviously, if I know the topic area — Prosecutorial discretion was an area that we dealt with a lot, like five, six years ago and I do know a lot about it. I had to see what the differences were in the memo. There were some key things I found, but the big debate yesterday was like, I was trying to say, “All right, we’re going to talk about – can we – what is prosecutorial discretion? What is administrative closure? Can I get my case open?” The reason I named it can I reopen my case is that that’s the question people are asking. So I realized quickly that Aaron was right. He was the one saying we don’t – Aaron always wings it – that we don’t need to prepare it and he’s right. I mean, we do know all this stuff, and I had read over the memo and outlined it.
I always get anxious. I never wanted to go in, not prepared and, but I knew this one was a little different and what I realized, first of all, it went great. I’ll see the numbers today what we’ve gotten so far. We didn’t have a huge number of people tuning in, but the actual information we gave I thought was very well and it went smoothly. So, that was good. But it – knowing what to prepare, what not to prepare is, especially for these lives, are not easy because you’re supposed to be more off the cuff like I’m doing here. And if you forget something, you forget something. So I always feel a little uneasy about doing it, but he’s right. And then I realized at the end afterward that the thing that we should be focusing on, although look, we’re trying to give out good information; correct, true information on what’s going on. We’re also obviously doing it to attract clients. So then I’m thinking about politics and how campaign managers do things.
There are certain buzz words that if we say, we’ll get transcribed and I can also hashtag. So for example, we’re talking about cases to reopen, people might look for a “Vawaw case” to reopen or “withholding of removal cases” to reopen. So I want to make a list now and they should probably be hashtagable I’m thinking so that I can use hashtags. I don’t have the manpower right now to do all these searches on what’s the best terms but I think if we would focus more on – as we could – we didn’t even have to preplan what cases we were going to talk about and that’s what people like to hear about the most. So I think it kind of just – it helped open my eyes up a little bit to be like, “Hey, let’s make sure we get these talking points in or these mentions in because essentially what we’re doing is selling our services and that’s first and foremost. The second thing that we’re doing is informing; obviously, it’s packaged a little differently. So that is all today for #FollowAttorneyAmanda, I’ll see you next time.
