How to live stream to Facebook & YouTube (and why you should)

3 min read
April 18, 2019

To grow your business you need to get two things right – reaching the right audience and turning them into customers. Running online events and meetings certainly help get you there, by reducing your costs and making it easy to reach far and wide.

But even with the perfect process in place, your reach is limited by how many leads you can get to your site. And that’s where live streaming to Facebook Live and YouTube live come in - it’s one of the best ways to extend the reach of your video outside of your platform and lead pages.

What is live streaming?

To “stream live” means to broadcast your live webinar, meeting, or online event in real time to an audience outside of your video conferencing platform.  

By using social platforms like Facebook and YouTube to stream your webinars, meetings, and online events live, you are leveraging their audiences and extending your reach to a potentially global audience. You’re also reaching your existing audience where they tend to already be. Even better, interfacing to YouTube and Facebook from a platform like Samba Live means that you can also record your live stream and live screen share to your audiences on these platforms.

So, whether your goal is to get more leads through a marketing webinar, extend the reach of your classroom on YouTube, or broadcast an online pitch event to thousands of users across the globe on Facebook - live streaming will be worth your effort.

How to live stream on Facebook

With over 8 billion daily views and 1 in 5 videos watched being Facebook live streams, there’s more incentive than ever for organizations to extend the reach of their webinars and online events to their Facebook pages. Live streaming from Samba Live makes this process easy.

To start live streaming to your Facebook page from Samba Live, you need to first make sure that you have a Samba Live Pro Plus account to have live streaming functionality. From your Samba Live room, click on the Live stream icon in the menu bar – this will take you to a popup with a dropdown menu titled Start live streaming to from where you’ll select Facebook.

Right beneath, you will see a field for Live stream key which we will get by,

  1. Going to your Facebook page.
  2. Click on Live in your post-box; which will open your live streaming options.
  3. Copy the Facebook live stream key and paste it back into the 'Live stream key' field in Samba Live.
  4. Click the Start stream button.

Back on your Facebook page, you’ll see your stream is connected and ready to go live. Just click the blue Go live button and you’ll be streaming live!

When you’re done hit the End Live Video button and you’ll have successfully completed your Facebook Live stream.

How to live stream on YouTube

Much like live streaming to Facebook, your YouTube livestreaming journey starts in Samba Live by click on the Live streaming option and selecting YouTube from the drop-down menu. Next, go to your YouTube account and follow the next few steps,

  1. In the upper right-hand corner of your YouTube account, click on your profile picture and select YouTube Studio from the drop-down.
  2. Then on the left side of the screen, select Other features and then Live streaming.
  3. At the bottom of the now open streaming page and click the Reveal button under the Encoder Setup module – this is where you’ll find the Stream Key.
  4. Copy this Stream Key and paste it back in 'Live stream key' field in Samba Live, then click Start stream.
  5. On your YouTube streaming page, you’ll see that your session is now LIVE.

And that’s it! If you’ve followed the above instructions you’ll be well on your way to becoming an expert at live streaming your Samba Live sessions to Facebook and YouTube Live audiences.

For a more detailed step-by-step guide on how to live stream, check out Samba Live University - Livestream for a full walk-through.

Get Email Notifications