Facebook has just rolled out new “mobile-first” social video creation tools for use in social advertising, which will allow marketers to add motion to existing pictures or video, or to create social video ads from existing company assets such as product photographs or logos. The tools are intended to help advertisers easily create Facebook video ads that are optimized for mobile devices.
Facebook first announced its plans for the new social video tools in August, and it has since revealed a framework called Create to Convert, allowing users to add limited motion to still images. Facebook’s own data shows that mobile-optimized advertising has advantages over non-optimized content, stating in a recent blog that “mobile-first creative has a 27 percent higher likelihood of driving brand lift and 23 percent higher likelihood of driving message association compared to video ads that are not optimized for mobile.”
Facebook’s new social video framework consists of three distinct tools:
- Video Creation Kit– This enables marketers to turn existing image and text assets into mobile-optimized videos that are framed in a 1:1 ratio for feed environments, or a 9:16 ratio for stories on Facebook as well as Instagram. There are four templates available, including:
- Promote a product (six-second video): Focus on a key product to generate interest and sales.
- Sell multiple products (six-second video): Show a selection of products, promote a special offer and drive sales.
- Show product benefits (fifteen-second video): Highlight product features, use case studies or explain how a product works.
- Drive product discovery (fifteen-second video): Bring your brand to life and share what makes your product unique.
- Video cropping– The new Facebook video cropping tool is designed to help users quickly and simply optimize the framing ratio of social video ads by cropping videos to recommended aspect ratios within the ad creation process. Video ads can be cropped to 1:1 and 4:5 for feed, 16:9 for in-stream and 9:16 for Facebook
- Simple video creation tools– These are designed to help advertisers quickly create templated videos directly from their brand’s Facebook page, drawing from existing page assets such as images and company logos. It is as simple as selecting the “animate” option when boosting a post; a video is automatically created which you can either use as is or customize to your needs.
According to Facebook, “These new tools are part of our ongoing effort to support businesses of all sizes and empower marketers to create effective ad campaigns built for the ways people are consuming content.”
Here at Beyond Fifteen, we have first-hand experience of how effective social video content can be in social advertising, compared to other types of content – but at the same time it can also be true that high-quality video content has the potential to be time-consuming and labor-intensive to produce. With Facebook’s new suite of tools, it will be easier for brands – and especially smaller businesses with less time and money to spend on marketing – to quickly and easily produce video content using existing brand assets.