Facebook tests the waters with new video pages
Facebook Inc. is trying out a new format for video pages, using a small number of big name Facebook pages to test out the new design.
One of the first pages to get the new look is the official ABC News Facebook page. The new design features a large featured video at the top, which includes a comment box showing a few top comments and the number of Likes the video has received. Below the featured video, there are also video playlists as well as dozens of video thumbnails for older content.
ABC News was also able to include a featured video on the About section of its Facebook page, which could prove to be a useful feature for news organizations and other multimedia-focused pages.
The new video page design is part of Facebook’s expansive plan to significantly increase its focus on video content over the next year. In Facebook’s first “Q&A with Mark” community town hall meeting in October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that within the next few years, Facebook content would be “mostly video.”
Part of this plan includes an increase in the number of auto-play video ads, both on the core Facebook site as well as on the Facebook mobile app. More ads will also be coming to the Facebook-owned Instagram app, which recently passed Twitter in popularity when it reached 300 million users earlier this month. In an attempt to draw in more video content makers, Facebook also began approaching famous YouTube stars, offering incentives for them to post exclusive Facebook content.
The popularity of videos on Facebook has also rapidly increased since the company started its focus on multimedia content, with the number of video views increase by about 50 percent between May and July of this year. Videos reached 1 billion average daily views since June, and a majority of those views are coming from mobile devices.
The new video page design is currently only available on ABC News and the Times, but depending on their success, the social network will likely roll out the features to other pages, and eventually to the average Facebook users.
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