Facebook to become a “video-first” company

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to design digital workplaces or “offices in the cloud.” These environments enable companies to allow flexible and remote working for their teams. I also teach the digital literacy, fluency, communication and collaboration skills needed to work in these modern technology-rich workplaces.

Yesterday morning during a virtual meeting with several business owners we were discussing the keys to using Facebook as a storytelling medium and I shared this slide with them highlighting that social video is a mega trend and an extremely powerful branding tool.

Interestingly late last night just after the Facebook Quarterly Results call Mark Zuckerberg made this comment:

“Our biggest focus has been putting video first across our apps. People are creating and sharing more video than ever, so we’re building new tools to make it easier to express yourself in creative ways.

The number of people going Live on Facebook at any moment has grown by 4x since May. We launched Instagram Stories less than 3 months ago, and already more than 100 million people are using it every day. We’re also building a brand new camera across our apps and we’ll be adding even more visual messaging tools over the next few months.” (Link here)

In a WSJ piece covering the call there was this additional piece of information:

“Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook would evolve into a ‘video-first’ company by making video core to each of its apps. Executives predict that within five years, most of what people consume online will be video.”

Are you ready for this future?