Mobile, Movie Marketing, Online

Facebook’s Video Hub Could be a Boon for Movie Studios

Facebook has announced some serious upgrades as it tries to compete more fully with YouTube in the online video market. It seems to want to do a few things:

  1. Play with video formats. We’ve already seen some of that as they push out live video in Facebook mentions and experiment with immersive video in a partnership with Star Wars.
  2. Create a hub: Apparently the idea is to create a new section within Facebook that’s dedicated to videos, taking out out of the Newsfeed and just showing you new videos
  3. Make recommendations: We know Facebook stinks at search and thinks it knows better that you what you want. So it will use those signals it gathers to keep serving you recommendations.

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The opportunities here for movie marketers are pretty obvious, particularly in the creation of the video hub. So a studio could setup a new hub for all the videos related to their movies.

But it still comes with the fact that you’re locked into Facebook’s ecosystem, which isn’t nearly as open and portable as YouTube. As always – at least in my opinion – the right answer isn’t one or the other, it’s both. Facebook gets you the quick hit of views as the video gets pushed to people’s Newsfeed, while YouTube is for embedding elsewhere and for long-tail search.

That last point is most important when considering how to utilize Facebook’s new video hub. Facebook, for all its benefits to publishers, sucks at search. It really does. But search is what YouTube does really well while it sucks at the updates feed. So keep that in mind when deciding how and where to distribute your videos.