Using video to engage your audience online is nothing new, but for professional communicators—specifically, social media managers—measuring how well your video efforts are doing is still very much in its infancy. That's apparent on Facebook, where currently page owners can only see how many people have started to watch their videos.
There's hardly anything to learn from such a simple metric, which is why Facebook announced yesterday that it is drastically expanding its video statistics. For PR professionals interested in measurement, these new features will offer a goldmine of insights. Here are some of the newest ways to track your video's effectiveness on Facebook:
- Data breakdowns: Now, you can track age, gender and country of your viewers. Really mind-blowing stuff.
- Audience retention: You can also track levels of interest at different parts of a video. Spikes in the percentage of views at a certain point could indicate that people are more interested in specific moments.
- Click to play: Facebook videos automatically play in people's feeds, but now you can measure how many people play your video on purpose.
- Detailed actions: New metrics will show you the number of viewers that reached certain points in a video—25%, 50%, 75%, 95% and 100%. This will help video creators to know when to place certain messages.
Facebook says that the new measurement features will be rolled out for for all paid and organic videos that are uploaded directly to its service over the next few weeks.
The new video metrics hardly reinvent the wheel and have been offered for years on video hosting sites like YouTube. Still, by offering these new metrics which are tied to highly-accurate Facebook accounts, communicators and page owners can look forward to more precise video statistics, and Facebook can look forward to cutting a bit into YouTube's video hosting dominance.
Learn more about more Facebook and social media trends at PR News’ Social Media Summit on June 3 at the Grand Hyatt in New York City.
Follow Brian Greene: @bwilliamgreene
Thank you, Facebook, for catching up! This will certainly simplify things.