14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has reached a really big milestone and it has decided to celebrate it in style – by introducing a small new feature.
The company has announced that it now has an average of more than 1 billion video views on Facebook every day. Not only has this new line of business turned out quite nice for Facebook, but the growth in video views exceeded 50 percent from May through July of this year.
As the company points out, video on Facebook was built to be mobile first, and now more than 65 percent of video views are on mobile.
It’s not just on mobile that video become a very important part, but also on the desktop website. On the entirety of Facebook’s platform, people have been sharing not only personal videos, but also news stories.
“Video uploaded directly to Facebook is an increasingly important part of News Feed, and more people than ever before are sharing, discovering and engaging with video that they care about,” states Fidji Simp, Facebook’s Project Management Director for Video.
Facebook introduces video views counter
In an effort to make videos even more useful, Facebook has been improving the feature over the past year. Now, with the new update, they’re rolling out video views. People will start being able to see how many views a video has received on Facebook, in a similar manner as they would on YouTube, for example.
Views will be shown on public videos from people and Pages, which should help users discover new and popular videos.
In the past year, Facebook has implemented some new video features, such as the auto-play, which is both loved and hated by the community. The update was rolled out slowly to its over 1.2 billion users so that the company could take into account feedback from people and to make various tweaks when needed.
Then, later, in June video ranking was improved to help deliver users content that they’d find relevant and interesting. On top of this, there’s also the feature that enables people to check out related videos once they’ve finished watching the one that ended up on their News Feed.
Video is becoming a bigger part of the News Feed
“Publishers and public figures are also creating and sharing more great video content on Facebook, from on-the-ground reporting from media organizations to exclusive releases and behind-the-scenes videos from public figures. Publishers now have more detailed metrics and better tools to help them reach their audiences on Facebook,” Simp notes.
He points out that the goal of the News Feed is to deliver the right stories to the right people at the right time.
While Facebook may not turn into being a huge competitor for, let’s say, YouTube, it does come with a very high level of user engagement for videos posted on the platform. Slowly, but surely, Facebook is turning into a place where you not only share cute pictures of your pets and family and chat with buddies you barely have time to meet, but also in a site where you discover news and viral videos.
