As Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) morphs from a status-posting platform to a serious news-sharing platform there is a noticeable change content creation on the largest social networking site.
In recent times, there is increasing acceptance among Facebook user crowd to ‘share’ videos or post videos over text and other formats on the communications site. It was found that in just the US alone, the trend was nearly 94%, with global video posted at 75%.
The result of all the mini-motion picture posts has meant that the ‘character’ of Facebook’s native News Feed too has undergone a sea-change. In the past year the number of video posts used by brands and people dramatically increased by over 3.6 times. Additionally, as of June 2014 data, the number of video views each day bordered about 1 billion!
And the most interesting inference drawn from the data was that most Facebook video viewers, especially in the US, discovered the videos by watching it on Facebook.
Therefore for content producers and publishers there is a lot of insight to be gleaned here.
New content carriers on Facebook are videos
As Facebook morphs into the new age of information sharing and production promotions, it has to be recognized that videos will be the way forward not just in the US but globally as well.
Therefore, older ‘techniques’ of calling viewer attention will now have to shift to engage from the first video frame itself, besides being in-line or parsed with the context the friend would like to share.
Business lessons to learn for brands: the focus will have to be on the ‘big data’ of contextual sharing. Videos will have to be brief and accurate. While reminiscent of the advertisement slots on TV, content creators, producers and publishers for Facebook will have to ensure that they are fit for mobile-format consumption as well. Despite the auto-play feature on the News Feed videos, most are played ‘mute’ until users choose to listen to it!
