Video is paying off big time for Facebook

With mobile internet getting better and smartphones having better cameras, video sharing is starting to become the norm for expression in social media.  Image INQUIRER.net

When Facebook decided to make video a priority on its platform, Mark Zuckerberg saw it as a big step for the company. Based on the most recent quarterly earnings call, it looks like the company is really raking it in, thanks to video.

Apart from increasing engagement from users through video comments, Facebook’s Marketplace has become a popular outlet for  video ads. The company’s average revenue per user has increased 49.1 percent in the US and Canada, reports Tech Crunch.

Zuckerberg had this to say about the effect of video regarding viewer engagement: “What is enabling video to become huge right now is that fundamentally the mobile networks are getting to a point where a large enough number of people around the world can have a good experience watching a video. If you go back a few years and you tried to load a video in News Feed it might have to buffer for 30 seconds before you watched it, which wasn’t a good enough experience for that to be the primary way that people shared. But now you can — it loads instantly. You can take a video and upload it without having to take five minutes to do that.”

Sharper cameras, bigger screen, better video-making tools also supplement increased user engagement. They allow amateur creators to share their work on the mobile platform.

Facebook is currently adding video filters and effects, selfie masks and overlaid graphics (similar to Snapchat), among others, thanks to its acquisition of AR lens startup MSQRD.

Apart from big-brand video ads, Facebook is also bringing in small businesses into the video format. COO Sheryl Sandberg explains that current smartphone technology allows these businesses to shoot their own video and effectively advertise themselves without the need for a costly production crew.

To increase effectivity, Facebook is also doing some deep research into AI to try to figure out what is in the content that people and advertisers post, then how to get said content to the target audience.

“When we think about video ads and what platform they run on, we really believe that over time the dollars will shift with eyeballs and our goal is to be the best dollar and the best minute people spend measured across channels,” Sanderberg says.

Facebook has done well to ride the changing times and has managed to stay above its competitors. With its kind of planning and foresight, it would appear that the status quo won’t be shifting any time soon.  Alfred Bayle