We know creators put a lot of thought and effort into the videos they post to Facebook. Which is why we want to highlight several tools you can use right now to optimize the content on which you’ve worked so hard.
Get to know six tools within Creator Studio that can make your process more efficient and may increase reach and engagement on your content.
Recently, we published tried-and-true best practices for video on Facebook based on feedback from the creator community. Many of the tools within Creator Studio can help you follow these guidelines to achieve your goals. (If you aren’t already familiar, Creator Studio is our one-stop-shop to upload, compose and post all your Facebook content.)
SMART CROP & SMART PREVIEW
Smart Crop can help you reframe and size the aspect ratios of your videos from 16:9 (horizontal) to either 1:1 or 4:5 for feed.
Why does that matter? People watch videos on mobile just inches from their face and often in vertical orientation, rather than turning their phone to landscape. Cropping vertically also takes up more space on a viewer’s mobile screen, capturing attention and keeping distractions at bay.
With Smart Crop, cropping can be done for you using machine learning. The tool optimizes for the main subject in the content, keeping them centered and in-frame. It prioritizes content that is most likely to catch people’s attention, such as human faces, high-contrast areas and prominent text.
You can review the reframed video prior to publishing, compare the reframed version with the original to decide which version you’d like to publish and finally, publish directly within Creator Studio.
Using Smart Crop allows you to:
Save time when reframing the sizes of your videos manually.
Reduce the amount of work it takes to optimize videos.
Potentially see increased video performance (i.e. improve engagement and keep viewers watching longer).
Just as Smart Crop uses machine learning to keep areas of interest visible in your crop, Smart Preview, another tool available within Creator Studio, uses machine learning to identify the part of your video that people are likely to find most interesting and cut it into a 10-second clip.
That clip is then added to the beginning of the video (a reminder that adding a trailer to the beginning of long-form video is a best practice) which may spark viewer interest and keep them watching longer.
If you schedule or save your video as a draft, you’ll be able to review its Smart Preview and adjust or discard it before your video is set to publish. If you want to publish your video immediately, the Smart Preview will generate and be inserted at the beginning of the video after publishing.
STORY HIGHLIGHT CLIPPING TOOL
Promoting your video content in Stories is a clever way of extending your reach and potentially increasing views. It is also, you guessed it, a best practice.
Our story highlight clipping tool allows you to create clips up to 20 seconds long from published videos and share them directly to Facebook Stories . You can either select clips manually or use machine learning-suggested clips. The Stories clip will be posted with a “See More” button that will drive viewers back to your original video.
This feature can be accessed by going to Creator Studio and navigating to the “Published” tab.
POST TESTING
While you know your audience best, testing different versions of your videos can help you optimize performance, understand what kinds of content resonates and discover trends, so you can make informed decisions about future posts.
Post Testing in Creator Studio lets you test up to four variants of a post to see which one your audience likes best. You can test different edits of a video, different descriptions, headlines and thumbnails–both pre-determined and manually-uploaded options. You also get to choose the metric that’ll determine the “winner” such as 1-minute views, comments, shares, reactions, people reached and link clicks.
During the test, the posts are circulated to a subset of your audience but are not posted to your Page. You choose how long you want the test to run for. When the test ends, the most successful variant is automatically published on your Page.
AUTO-CAPTIONS & SUBTITLES
Captions make your content more accessible and can grab the attention of people who watch videos with sound turned off. When captions are added to your video, they may increase your video’s watch time and distribution–naturally, a best practice.
To help you save time, Facebook automatically generates captions when you upload your video. By default, auto-generated captions are turned on for all of your video content, though you can manually turn them off on a Page-level or on an individual video.
While captions are generated in the same language spoken in the video, subtitles open your content up to new audiences in other regions and languages, thus extending potential global distribution.
When auto-generated subtitles are enabled, viewers have the option to watch your content with subtitles in one of 11 most-commonly watched languages on Facebook: English, Indonesian Bahasa, Spanish (Latin America), Hindi, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Brazilian Portuguese, Standard Arabic, Urdu, Tamil and Telugu.
Note that the auto-generated subtitles will only work with videos that do not currently have burned-in captions, so that the captions can be auto-generated through the closed captioning feature.
“We often see subtitled videos performing better than non-subtitled videos, and we also know that a large proportion of our audience are based in non-English speaking countries so this could make our content more engaging for them.”
– Sky Sports
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*Generally expected individual results will differ.
