Facebook Updates Aim to Help Video Creators Streamline Process, Boost Discovery

Facebook revealed several updates aimed at making it easier for creators to upload and manage videos on their pages, as well as to drive discovery of those videos. An update released Tuesday for pages globally contains changes to its playlists feature, as well as a new option, series, enabling creators to better organize their videos and improve related content that is suggested to viewers, boosting discovery. [kickout id="1"] The social network said in a blog post Tuesday that it rolled out a new videos tab, providing viewers with a central destination for a page’s series and playlists. The videos tab will appear on pages regardless of whether their administrators opt for a traditional page template or a video template that provides a video-first experience for people visiting the page. The new videos tab for pages also enables viewers to opt in and receive notifications when new videos are uploaded. Facebook said in its blog post that the revamped playlists feature enables creators to publish new videos without the need to create separate pages, giving creators a better way to organize topical or thematic content, and potentially upping distribution of their videos via related content recommendations. Viewers can click to open playlists directly via News Feed, and those playlists have unique URLs that can be shared on or off Facebook. [kickout id="2"] When viewers open a playlist, whether from News Feed or a page, videos will play back in the order set by the creator. The new Series option also brings better distribution for videos through related content recommendations. Series are featured prominently on creators’ pages and, much like playlists, they have unique URLs that make them easy to share, and videos are played back in the order set by the creator. Viewers can continue watching episodes on the series page or within the Facebook Watch video destination. Also, whether they arrive from News Feed, the page or the videos tab, viewers will see a list of all episodes in a series, enabling them to navigate between seasons and episodes, or they can continue watching where they left off, as well as view trailers. Playlists can be created, managed, edited and reordered via Creator Studio. Facebook wrote in its blog post, “Your playlists and series will perform best when the content you add to them is truly thematically related. For example, a playlist of recipe videos will perform better than one covering a range of topics without a coherent theme. Curating your content by theme provides the best viewer experience, gives Facebook stronger signals about when to recommend your content and increases the likelihood that viewers will discover and watch videos from your playlist or series.” The social network revamped its Bulk Uploader last December, and Tuesday, it added Bulk Actions, which it described as “smarter editing tools that will enable you to apply settings or take actions on videos in bulk,” either at the time of upload or via the content library. The updated Bulk Uploader lets creators upload up to 50 videos to a page in a single action, as well as to edit titles and descriptions, add tags, schedule posts and choose other settings. [kickout id="3"] Actions that can be handled via Bulk Actions are: in-stream ads, Rights Manager (Lite and Pro), bulk scheduling, add tags, add custom labels, add video to playlist/series, auto captions and audience restrictions. The social network cautioned that actions will only be visible to creators who are eligible for them, saying as an example that the enable ads option will only be seen by monetization-eligible creators.