Facebook Intensifies Its Video Efforts

Facebook loves what people love. The last year we saw the social network making video-centric changes. We think it was the first sign of Facebook falling for video. This year we witnessed the network’s increasing love for video. Untill now Facebook has made several changes to their video feature.  The latest can be seen on ABC News’ Facebook Page

 First reported by TechCrunch, a newly designed section for video is on the cards. The design first spotted on ABC News’ Page shows an extra-large featured video at the top with a live stream of comments next to the video.  

 Also, seen is the Must See Video Section  

 According to the Techcrunch article Pages will get the new design automatically. If they don’t select a featured video or make playlists, their videos will just show up in a chronological list, but with titles, length, Like counts, and view counts visible.Currently the Facebook’s video section looks pretty disorganised 

Facebook’s love for video isn’t a new-found one 

 In September Facebook announced that more people are uploading, sharing and exploring videos on the network. Since June the videos on the network are fetching more than 1 billion daily views (65% of those views are happening on mobile devices). Facebook has been investing heavily on its video products. Last year, Facebook started testing auto-playing news feed video ads for a limited number of accounts. In June 2014, the video ranking in newsfeed was improved to help users see more relevant and quality video. And these efforts have proved fruitful for the blue giant.  

Facebook Wins the Desktop Game 

  Though Facebook surpassed YouTube for desktop video but it falls behind Google sites for video views across different devices, according to comScore Video Metrix.  

Content Creators Flee from YouTube 

In November, the Facebook users directly uploaded more videos to the network than first uploading them to the YouTube and then sharing it on Facebook, according to Socialbakers’ analysis of 180,000 Facebook video posts across 20,000 Facebook pages. 

  Facebook has also surpassed YouTube in terms of interactions – be it views or engagement. “The subsequent result: YouTube is steadily losing a key distribution platform as content marketers are shifting to Facebook.” said Socialbakers in a blog post.   

  According to Socialbakers CEO Jan Rezab Facebook videos are simply “more natural” to share and interact with than YouTube videos. They appear in the news feed, which is a key discovery platform. Discussions in the comments are (for the most part) with your friends rather than strangers. And Facebook also provides a bigger video preview image through the news feed than the small preview boxes you get on YouTube.

Facebook’s deal with NFL – a game changer? 

The social network recently inked a deal with the National Football League (NFL) which allows Facebook to show video clips from NFL. The clips will be followed by ads from Verizon Wireless. NFL and Facebook will share the ad revenue. The deal though being called as a test is one of the proofs that the social network is aggressively moving into video. Also, it is a blow to Twitter, which signed a more or less similar deal with the NFL last year. The deal this year is seen by many as an endorsement by the NFL of Facebook which is undoubtedly an attarctive advertising option with its 864 million daily users.  

Facebook Vs YouTube – who will win?

A  report in WSJ published a couple of months ago said that Facebook is approaching Youtube’s biggest content producers to distribute their videos on Facebook. Whether Facebook can topple YouTube’s mantle as the web’s video giant – the time can only say.  

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