Facebook has quickly become one of the #1 places where people watch videos with more than four billion videos seen per day. Most of these videos, however, are seen because they happen to show up in people’s news feed. This has been something of a challenge for marketers since unless the individual is actively following them, they won’t be nearly as likely to stumble across their videos.
Facebook has just announced that they are testing a feature that will allow users to actively seek out videos much more like Google’s YouTube service. This will include the option to search for videos, mark videos to ‘watch later’ and see videos similar to those you have already watched. You can even watch videos that your friends have liked.
The ideas, it seems, is to help encourage users to spend more time on the Facebook platform watching videos and even make Facebook the ‘go to’ destination whenever looking for any type of video online. This, of course, will put them in direct competition with YouTube for the online video destination of choice.
Whether they are successful or not, it seems likely that this will further grow the amount of time people are spending on Facebook. In addition, it will make the Facebook platform more attractive for video marketers. Marketers will be able to put their videos out on the system and people can find them more easily, even if they are not actively following your page.
The testing started over the summer and some of the features tested have already been implemented into the normal Facebook system.
You can see more about this feature in Facebook’s official announcement HERE.
