At one point, you are really working hard on your business idea report for ccdc, but then you accidentally click on your Facebook tab and start scrolling your timeline. Facebook has implemented the great feature that it plays videos automatically when you scroll near them. At the end you are hooked, watching videos on Facebook voor several minutes. I am sure this happens to almost everyone.
According to Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, every day more than 100 million hours of video content is being watched on Facebook worldwide. This video content ultimately leads to more engagement on the social media platform. People are liking and sharing video content with their friends. This creates online conversations and a increased popularity of the platform and more time spend on the platform. Which ultimately leads to more value creation for the platform. Social videos might be the new social media trend in 2016.
Facebook is even taking the impact of videos on your social media behaviour to a whole new level. At the mobile world congres in Barcelona this February, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Samsung and Facebook are joining forces. Facebook wants to implement Samsung VR technology on their platform. The goal is to ultimately change the way we watch our videos. Facebook want to make the users more involved with virtual reality and and create a more social video experience. (Business Insider, 2016).
But this is not the end. Since last year Facebook was testing the applicability of 360 videos on Facebook. When you rotate your mobile phone the angle in the video is rotated as well. This year Facebook introduce a very new and innovative feature. Facebook is testing the possibilities to directly like a particular moment while watching the video. (The Verge, 2016).
Facebook can also benefit financially by creating a new environment to watch videos. Since the spendings on online video advertisements have been increased over the past years. With their increased popularity and more viewers, they can increase their piece of the pie on what platform companies spend their budget on.
A study on the number of shared videos on different platforms by Social Bakers, showed some interesting results. In the image below we even see that Facebook is already outperforming Youtube in the number of videos whom are being shared per day.
What do you think about video engagement on social media platforms? And what do you think will be the next big thing in video engagement? I tried to search for papers regarding the increased popularity and impact of videos on social media platforms, but yet not much has been published yet. Maybe an interesting thesis topic for next year?
References:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/9/11188728/facebook-oculus-gear-vr-video-like-share
http://www.reelseo.com/vice-news-social-video/
http://www.socialbakers.com/blog/2351-the-rise-of-social-video-in-2015
http://www.statista.com/statistics/256272/digital-video-advertising-spending-in-the-us/
Consumer Value Creation 