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| Facebook Adds Display Of Video Views As They Soar Past 1 Billion Daily |
Facebook video is growing up, but it’s still early days for
marketers trying to figure out how to use the platform to
connect with consumers.
That’s the main takeaway from the flurry of stories today
reacting to Facebook’s announcement that video on the
network is getting more than 1 billion daily views and that it
will start displaying view counts on video.
There’s no doubt that Facebook users are watching more
video.
The company has been making sure of that since last
December by serving it with audio-free autoplay in News Feeds.
It also adjusted the News Feed algorithm in June to show
more video to people who tend to watch a lot of video.
And the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge alone has sparked more
than 17 million videos that have been viewed 10 billion times
by 440 million people between June 1 and September 1.
So it’s no surprise that Facebook reports that video views
grew by 50% between May and June and that since June
views are averaging more than a billion a day or that 65% of
those views are happening on mobile devices.
But what does that mean for publishers, businesses and
other marketers trying to reach customers on Facebook? I
believe, it’s too early to tell what the long-term potential will
be.
For one thing, the auto-play video in News Feeds is still
something of a novelty and it’s quite possible that users will
start to tune it out. For another, producing compelling video
is not easy or inexpensive, so marketers and publishers with
limited budgets might stay on the sidelines.
Video advertisers are also seeing good results,
Facebook said in a blog post. Helped by the use of the
video views targeting objective, advertisers are “seeing a
significant decrease in cost per view for their Facebook video
ads. So in the coming weeks, we’ll extend the availability of
videos that play automatically to more content from more
brands in the US.”
For marketers of more limited means, there’s not much to
report, although Facebook Page administrators have been
given access to more detailed video analytics, which will aid
measuring the effectiveness of campaigns.
Also, Facebook has added the ability for Pages to add calls
to action that display at the end of videos, “allowing content
creators to invite people to visit a destination, such as a
website, after the video ends to learn more, watch more or
make a purchase.”