Facebook has recently been spotted testing a new design and a handful of new features aimed to enhance the user experience of business pages when it comes to displaying and consuming video content.
The new design for the video section of Facebook pages can be seen on ABC News’ page — TechCrunch reports that these features will eventually make their way to all business pages.
In addition to a new design, which looks and feels a lot like YouTube Channels, comes the ability to choose a featured video and create video playlists. The featured video will be displayed in an extra large format across the top of the video section, similar to how you can currently set featured posts to be displayed in a similar manner.
Could this possibly be a tactic Facebook is using to encourage businesses to upload more video content directly to the social network, as opposed to sites like YouTube? With reports coming out this month that Page owners are, for the first time ever, uploading more videos directly to Facebook than sharing links to videos on YouTube it’s understandable that the company would like to keep this momentum going.
Whether or not these features will encourage Page owners to upload more videos directly to Facebook, and/or encourage users to consume more video content, will remain to be seen as the social network rolls the features out to more pages.
These features will be available to all Pages over the coming weeks. The new design will appear automatically, and all videos will be displayed with titles, length, Like counts, and view counts. If a featured video isn’t set then all the videos will just be displayed chronologically.
