Facebook started off as just a social networking site. It still boasts to be the same, but it goes far beyond “just social networking”. You and I know it. In order to keep the Facebook saga going, it needed to innovate. Facebook started to become a tad bit boring with just sharing images of friends, tagging them, liking, commenting, and all that drama. It then moved onto add another feature of “telling your friends where you are, what your doing, how your feeling, and who you are with”. This added a cool pride factor for those who wanted to boast off their accomplishments and travels. But this feature too didn’t last long. While Facebook was looking at ways to innovate, videos, on the other hand, began to trend on the Internet. The social networking giant took notice of this and made good use of it. Facebook added the “Upload Video” feature alongside its famous and most used “Upload Image” button. Video has been taken to such an extent that now Facebook profile pictures too can be a 7-second video. Yeah! you heard me right, it can be a teeny video. Also, Facebook increased the video length in Instagram recently and is planning to give more importance to videos in all its social media websites.
According to Mark Zuckerberg’s Q4 earnings, Facebook now has more than 100 hours of video time a day. YouTube being their biggest competitor is only seconds away in the lead. How did Facebook do it? Well, they introduced many new tools to improve the video experience which revolved around advertisements. The new features for video ads enable the advertisers to communicate their messages with better ways to attract the viewer’s attention with automated captioning for sound-off videos, new metrics, and Moat integration.
The introduction of sound-off videos is a smart move by Facebook. We know that most of the users are mobile users and playing video while travelling or even working was impossible, but with this new feature Facebook has played smart to increase video viewing. Well done, Facebook.
According to Facebook, new changes in the metrics department includes a feature that now shows the percentage of people who have viewed their videos with sound in Page Insights, and which will be soon available in Ads Insights too. Facebook also announced that it is rolling out a new, redesigned video metrics interface in Page Insights, which will add Minutes Viewed and 10 Second View metrics as well as a new Sound-On versus Sound-Off feature.
“The updated interface also makes it easy for publishers to access more granular video performance data by clicking through individual metrics on the updated Insights view”, says product manager Anaid Gomez Ortigo.
Another update that Facebook brought in to increase video viewing is the recent launch of live video to the Pages Manager. Now users can do a live video stream without any difficulty and many people including celebrities are using this new live video feature to communicate with their followers.
Facebook has taken the online video sector by storm. It has slowly incorporated the video factor into its pages along with the auto play feature that is an even bigger hit than the social network itself. Let’s see how far they go. We live in an Internet era of opportunities, mainly in the video sector. The case of Facebook is just an example. Video monetization is a huge business these days and efforts of these corporates to showcase videos in the most entertaining way possible shows the growing scope in the online video business.
