Facebook Debuts Creator App To Aid Live Broadcasts

Still trying to foster a community of video creators to rival YouTube’s, Facebook is rolling out new tools for producers big and small.  

Packaged within a new “Creator” app, some of the new tools should make it easier to create live broadcasts, and then personalize them with original intros and outros, graphic frames, and custom live stickers.

With a new “community” tab, producers can connect with fans and collaborators via a unified inbox, which centralizes comments from Facebook and Instagram, and messages from Messenger.

“We understand that creators have specific needs, and we’re committed to helping them on their journey,” Chris Hatfield, a video product manager at Facebook, notes in a new blog post.

The Creator app also offers camera effects and frames, and tools to cross-post content to other platforms.

Additionally, Facebook is offering easier access to metrics, which are designed to help creators make more sense of the way people respond to theirs videos and Pages.

For Facebook, the new app is part of an aggressive push into video content. To that end, the tech titan recently debuted Watch -- a video hub designed to complement the various videos that users find in their News Feeds.  

Similar to what consumers have come to expect from YouTube, Facebook is positioning Watch as a platform for all types of streaming “shows,” from video blogs to live broadcasts to scripted series.  

While still relatively new, Facebook’s video ad strategy is already showing signs of success.

Across its flagship platform and Audience Network, internal data shows more than 70% of in-stream video ads -- up to 15 seconds in length -- are viewed to completion.

Analysts agree that the social network increasingly owes its success to video.

“Facebook’s users are captivated by videos on the platform,” eMarketer forecasting analyst Monica Peart noted in a recent report. “Video, both live and recorded, is a key driver of growing user engagement and advertiser enthusiasm.”

Some businesses are responding to Facebook’s video shift more than others.

Retailers, for one, are pouring money into mobile video ads on the platform. Among Nanigans’ ad clients, spending on those types of units was up a whopping 40% from the third quarter of 2016 to the third quarter of this year.

Nanigans’ clients are mostly direct-response advertisers, when video has historically been associated with brand advertising. Increasingly, however, direct-response advertisers -- ecommerce marketers especially -- are leveraging mobile video to drive new and repeat purchases.

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