You spend plenty of time on Facebook, so there’s no way you could’ve missed one of the most influential features to hit the social media platform in recent history: the video auto play. As you scroll through your News Feed, you’ll notice that videos begin to play without any interaction from you. At first considered annoying by some users, video auto play has quickly caught on as a positive feature, especially for marketers. Here’s what’s going on with this new perk.Auto Play: What a Facebook User Sees
When you consider the fact that your target audience is bombarded with numerous ad impressions every day, it’s easy to discount the impact of auto play. But these videos are rolling as users are scrolling, which captures their attention simply because of the movement itself. There’s no sound playing, so you’re not interfering with the Facebook News Feed experience – and, therefore, not irritating your target audience. If they decide to interact, such as by clicking on the video or turning off mute, they’ll get the full glory of your content.
Specific Benefits for Marketers
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They see your content by choice: If a user does interact with your video ad to see the content and hear the audio, they’re doing it because they want to. Whether it’s because they liked what they saw in the few seconds as they were scrolling or because your video was shared by someone they trust, you have them on the hook.
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It’s not disruptive: Facebook video ads run as users scroll, but the silence makes them less intrusive in the News Feed. Plus, the ads are within the field of vision as a person is scanning down; they’re less likely to be ignored as sidebar or banner ads tend to be.
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Auto Play ads are now available via Facebook’s lower price structure: The almighty budget is what controls many of our marketing decisions, so a more reasonably priced ad structure is attractive to marketers. Auto play ads are not only more competitively priced under Facebook’s new strategy, but they have a better angle. Premium ads are intended to boldly reach a huge audience, whereas auto play is intended to be more targeted.
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Watched Auto Play ads are featured more prominently: Facebook upgraded the News Feed algorithm in June 2014 – again, with the intention of maintaining a high-quality experience for users. The technology behind this move results in putting the most watched videos at the forefront, as users want to see what everyone else is viewing.
- They do well on mobile devices: It’s true that Facebook users can turn off video auto play when they’re not connected to a WiFi network. At one point, the biggest complaint of the feature was that videos would hog tons of data because they’d play automatically without user clicks. However, once they realized that the auto play could be disabled, viewers of video ads embraced them just as much as they did on PCs and Mac.
Video auto play isn’t going away, so marketers must embrace it and learn how to take full advantage of its benefits. The tendency of these videos to capture the attention of your target audience can’t be denied, but it’s what marketers do after they’ve sparked a viewer’s interest that matters
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