Our main objective was to develop powerful, engaging, visual, and interactive Facebook Live shows for “Go There,” CNN’s daily show built exclusively for Facebook Watch.
One of CNN’s strengths is its global reach and large army of correspondents stationed around the world, so it seemed natural to take advantage of those resources in our live strategy, giving our reporters a platform to take us somewhere in the world where an important story is happening, giving viewers an opportunity to ask questions and interact with the correspondent and guests.
For our live shows, we really wanted to create an engaging experience, taking the viewer somewhere around the world they wouldn’t normally have access to, and feeling like they are experiencing the story first hand.
When planning a live show, we first identify a big breaking news story around the world (whether it’s a hurricane, unrest in the streets, wildfires, etc). We then coordinate with our newsgathering desks to see if there is a correspondent assigned or if we can assign one to the story. Once we’ve assigned the story and reporter, we work to make the live as visual and engaging as possible – ideally incorporating a walk-and-talk, show and tell of the area, interview with people on the ground, and audience Q&A, where we feed real-time questions from live viewers to the reporter to answer.
We’ve gone live from Syria, Hong Kong, India, Venezuela, Switzerland, England, Japan, China, Australia, the Vatican, Iraq, Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Israel, Brazil, California wildfires, Capitol Hill, Mar-a-Lago, all around the U.S, and more.
Our live episodes frequently have millions of views and tens of thousands of live viewers. The audience is extremely global (top countries include US, India, Philippines, England, Australia, Hong King) and skews 25-34.
Our live with Brooke Baldwin outside the Staples Center where people were paying tribute to Kobe Bryant had 78,000 concurrent viewers.
https://www.facebook.com/cnn/videos/617863895692173/
When we went live with our meteorologist showing pictures of the volcano in the Philippines, it resulted in 14 million views
https://facebook.com/cnn/videos/473449580234331/
A live from the halls of the Capitol during impeachment proceedings had 5.7 million views
https://www.facebook.com/cnn/videos/2511835352473235/
A live in the streets of Hong Kong had over 2.5M views
https://www.facebook.com/cnn/videos/430529434334463/
