Facebook Announces Video Insight Tools for Publishers and Brands
Facebook took an important step in making its videos more useful to publishers, brands, and advertisers yesterday, when it announced a variety of new metrics and enhancement tools for on-demand, live, and 360-degree videos.
Video-creators will get a better idea of who's watching their creations thanks to new demographic tools. Creators can view the age, gender, and top geographic locations of their audience. They can also compare demographic results with overall results. This tool is in the Video Insights area, in a new card called Audience and Engagement.
A new engagement tool for live video shows how the audience responded while viewing the stream. Video-creators can see the volume of reactions, comments made, and sharing activity. Together, these show which moments viewers found the most engaging. Creators can look at engagement spikes, then see what occurred during those moments of the video. This tool is in the Video Insights area in the new Audience and Engagement card; choose the Video Engagement section.
A new sharing activity metric works with all types of videos, showing not only how often videos were shared, but also how long recipients viewed them. Writing in the Facebook Media blog, product manager Anaid Gomez-Ortigoa notes that 48 percent of all video watch-time on the social network comes from shares. This tool is located in the Minutes Viewed and Views cards.
Facebook has started rolling the new tools out to all video creators, and will finish in a few weeks.
For 360-degree video creators, Facebook has a useful enhancement and an engagement tool. The new Guide tool lets 360-degree creators highlight areas of interest in their works so that viewers know where to look. Viewers are free to scroll around as they wish, but the Guide tool helps them find key moments. When uploading a video, creators have the option of specifying it as a 360-degree video and adding guide points.
Finally, the new Heatmap tool shows where viewers were looking during a 360-degree video. The areas in red—the hottest areas—were the most viewed. This tool is available for any 360-degree video that receives over 50,000 unique viewers. It's located in Publishing Tools in the Video Library.
Related Articles
The move will offer a new revenue stream for publishers, and encourage them to post more premium video to the platform.
10 Jan 2017
Online video, social networking, and presidential politics combine as both Facebook and Twitter will live stream the upcoming general election debates.
21 Sep 2016
Following tragic shootings in Minnesota and Texas, Facebook found its live video streaming used for reasons it hadn't anticipated. When deciding what video to allow, context is everything.
12 Jul 2016
Look for broadcasters to begin streaming live video to Facebook, as the social network opened up its API for third-party hardware and software developers.
12 Apr 2016
The social network debuts a range of live video features, putting live streaming at the heart of its mobile experience.
06 Apr 2016