Improvements have been made the past year to grow the use of videos on Facebook and it looks like they paid off, giving the social network an average of over a billion views each day. Still, more video features will be added when an update rolls out this week.
Facebook announced Sunday in a statement that new features will be officially made available to all videos posted on the social network. Video views have dramatically grown in recent months, with a boost of more than 50 percent recorded from May to July. In line with the growing popularity of videos on the social network, Facebook wants to improve how videos function for both the benefit of publishers and viewers with the help of new features.
For starters, it will now be possible for people to see how many views a video has logged, a simple but efficient metric that will give publishers an idea as to how their videos are performing on Facebook. The call-to-action will complement this feature as it allows publishers to leverage their most popular videos, inviting viewers to take a certain kind of action, like visiting a website, watching more videos, or making a purchase when the video ends.
Generally, Facebook's goal is to create "a compelling offering around our partners' content. Things that drive engagement on Facebook are a win. Things that drive distribution to our partners' sites are a win," said Justin Osofsky, Facebook's VP of media partnerships.
Video rankings, which received improvements in June, will expound on the view-count feature by showing people a list of the most popular videos on Facebook that may be relevant to them. There's another feature too that curates public videos from Pages and people, allowing mobile users to discover new videos they might be interested in based on what they have just finished watching.
"The goal of News Feed is to deliver the right stories to the right people at the right time, from the people and things you care about. And more people than ever before are seeing, sharing and expressing themselves with video on Facebook. We're committed to making Facebook the best place to share, discover and watch videos, and we'll keep listening to feedback to improve video on Facebook," said Product Management Director for Video, Fidji Simo, in the announcement.
Many are commenting that Facebook's video features are nothing new as these have been YouTube staples for a while now but various entities are still eager to explore video use on the social network because of the digital marketing opportunities it offers.
