Facebook Launches the First Video Series to Share More Insight into its Product Development Process
Facebook has today launched the first video in a new series that will provide insights into its video products – how they were built, what they were built for, how the features work and what’s coming next.
The first video in the series, hosted by Jeff Birkeland from the Facebook product team, is an interview with Jen Lee, a product marketing manager working on the Facebook Creator Studio app.
Facebook launched its Creator Studio app back in February, as a companion to the Creator Studio desktop app. Initially, the app was limited because while you could schedule posts and view analytics, you couldn’t actually create posts within the app. Facebook rectified this in May, adding full post creation capability to the app.
Lee first outlines the basics of the app, then highlights some key pointers on why people should consider using it.
The first keynote is that it’s not possible to publish as a personal profile through the Creator Studio app, which can help to limit mistakes.
As explained by Lee:
“We routinely got feedback from creators and publishers that when they used the main Facebook mobile app to publish content, they almost always accidentally published as their personal profile, so we wanted to take care of that issue.”
Lee also notes that the Creator Studio app also provides access to a range of ‘video-specific metadata features’ which you can’t access via the main Facebook app.
“So if you want to add pieces like video titles, video description, video thumbnails, then the Creator Studio app is the app for you.”
Birkeland explains that the Creator Studio app is video-focused, and tied to deeper video insights, as opposed to other Facebook publishing apps, which is really the app’s core value proposition.
In addition to this, Lee also says that the top two requests they get to improve the Creator Studio app, which they are working to develop, are Facebook Live integration and Instagram posting integration.
Lee says the Instagram integration “will a little bit of a bigger undertaking”, given most of the functionality is already available within the Instagram mobile app, but Facebook Live integration is already being rolled out to some users.
There are some interesting notes here, and it’s good to get actual insight from the team working on these products as to why they’ve been developed, and where they’re headed in the future. I wasn’t, for example, aware of the video-specific focus of Creator Studio, which could make it a bigger consideration for those looking to post video content to their Facebook Pages.
Facebook plans to add more video interviews in the future, and we’ll keep an eye on them for any insights worth sharing.
