Here’s an idea for giving Facebook friends a peek at how Toastmasters works in your club. This morning, we shared the Table Topics portion of our meeting (done roughly contest style in prep for contest season) on Facebook Live. Participants were told they could opt out of the video broadcast but none did. We posted the replay with a link back to our club website, hoping that someone who sees this will come visit and join.
Some details on how this was done:
The easiest way of doing a Facebook Live broadcast that I know of is using the app on your phone. It also seems to work best with the phone held vertically rather than horizontally, which is why the video is oriented the way it is. I bought a tripod attachment that clamps onto a smart phone so I could produce a steadier video than if it was done handheld.
In the replay, you can hear a see and hear a bit of fussing over getting the tripod positioned properly and a bit of interplay between Topics Master Marilyn Kiernan Brown and club President Lorraine Campbell over how the contest should be run. But keep in mind not everyone who watches live would tune in the moment the broadcast starts — it takes a few moments for people to see the notification and decide to watch, even assuming they are online at that moment. So I figured it’s better to start a few minutes early, rather than waiting for the speakers to be introduced.
This was shot on a Samsung Galaxy 7 Edge phone, which did a surprisingly good job of picking up the speaker’s voices, even from the other side of the room.
P.S. It took a little poking around to find out where to download one of these replay videos, but here is where you find that link. I figured I might do a little editing for a cleaner version that doesn’t have me futzing with the tripod as a distraction.
As a WordPress enthusiast, I also have to put in a quick plug for how easy it is to embed Facebook video in a web page or blog post. Click on the date associated with the video post to find the permalink (the permanent link for that resource). Copy and paste that link into the body of your content, and WordPress automatically adds the video embed code when the content is viewed on the public site.
