I was running one of my “Video Marketing with your phone” courses this morning and we were talking about how you could edit together multiple videos and stills to create new videos. One of the participants wanted to use some of the footage from a Facebook Live video she recorded at an exhibition a few weeks ago but she hadn’t got it on her phone or computer. The easiest thing to do is to save it as soon as you’ve finished recording, but if you’ve run out of space on your phone or you’ve got a flaky wifi signal, that’s not always possible. The good news is it’s easy to download it later.

So, in case you ever want to repurpose some or all of your live footage and you didn’t save it immediately, here’s how to download an old Facebook Live video:

• You’ll need to view your video on a computer – there isn’t currently a way to do this via the Facebook app on your phone. (If you know how to get around that let me know!) So go to the Facebook page where you shared your video and find it in the timeline.
• Double click on the video so it opens in its own window. Click on the small downward arrow in the top right-hand corner to reveal the menu. It will look something like this:
• Click on the “Download Video” option (circled in red in the above screenshot to help you find it).  It will save your Facebook Live video to your computer as an MP4 file

Now you’ve got it as an MP4, you can treat it just like you would any other video – e.g. edit it in your favourite video editor, upload it to YouTube or Vimeo, and so on.

If you found that useful, like my “Photography for Busy Business People” Facebook page to get more tips and hints on using and creating photos and videos to promote your business.

UPDATE- MARCH 2017: I’ve amended my instructions slightly to account for downloading your Facebook Live from your personal page. The above instructions should still work for ones on your business page.  Here’s the video with the full set of instructions: