According to Digital Music News, Facebook now serves up four billion videos every single day (a quadruple increase over last year), and that number is rising quickly. “A year or two from now, we think Facebook will be mostly video,” says Ted Zagat, Facebook head of ad product.
Obviously Facebook’s ongoing mission is to make the platform more attractive to advertisers. And what’s more attractive than the prospect of rolling highly-targeted and unskippable ads before trending videos?
Thus begins the loop: Facebook pushes video, so advertisers favor video, so Facebook will favor video (even more than it did before) when determining what content should be displayed in users’ feeds. That means musicians with an active Facebook following will need to adjust in order to reach fans.
You might want to start thinking about Facebook more along the lines of YouTube
If Facebook shifts to become (primarily) a video platform, the pressure will be on for musicians to post more video content there. The bad news? Well, your video views and engagement will be split between two competing platforms, Facebook and YouTube. The good news? Much of the same content you’re currently creating for YouTube could easily work on Facebook, so at least you’re not going to have to do double your work when it comes to video production.
If you’re worried about Facebook pivoting towards video, here are a few articles that might help you create more engaging videos on a budget, and how to get the most out of those videos:
Twelve kinds of videos to promote your music
Five practical DIY film tips for musicians
Facebook advertising for musicians
“No matter what you think of Facebook, you have to market your music there”
Have you effectively used videos on Facebook to promote your music? Let us know about it in the comments below.
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Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.