Facebook made clear earlier this year that it’s cool with marketers paying publishers to produce branded videos and distribute them for free through the publishers’ Facebook Pages. Now it’s making it easier for the brands also to distribute the videos through their own Pages without needing to upload the videos themselves.
On Thursday Facebook announced that any Page can cross-post a video, including 360-degree videos and soon for videos that had been live but aren’t anymore, originally uploaded by another Page, so long as that cross-posting Page has the originating Page’s permission. The company also announced that Pages will be able to take a video they had originally uploaded organically and run it as a video ad with the organic video’s and video ad’s view counts being combined in the Page’s Page Insights tabs, which would juice Facebook’s already inflated viewership figures.
Before we get into what this new cross-posting capability means, let’s run through how things worked before today.
Publisher X would make a video for Brand Y and most likely post it to Publisher X’s Page because that’s where more people might see it, or at least more people who might see it as entertainment rather than the advertisement it actually is. But maybe the branded video is legitimately entertaining, so much so that Brand Y didn’t want to just share Publisher X’s video post. It wanted to publish its own video post to its own Page and gain some creative cred. To do that, Brand Y would have to ask Publisher X to send it a Dropbox link in order to download the raw video file then upload the video to Facebook, where it already lived just one another Page.
Now Facebook is cutting out that last step.
After Publisher X and Brand Y have formalized an agreement through Facebook for Brand Y to cross-post Publisher X’s videos, Brand Y will see a new tab within its Page’s Publishing Tools section titled “Videos You Can Crosspost” that lists those videos from Publisher X. Brand Y can pick a video and then draft a post including that video as if it were a video it had uploaded on its own. Brand Y will also be able to see the same stats for that video, like number of views, shares and likes, as if it were its own video, though those stats will only apply to the brand’s post and won’t include stats for Publisher Y’s video post.
While it would look to Brand Y’s audience that the video was posted directly by the brand, in truth Publisher X would still own control of the video. If Publisher X eventually takes down the video, it would be removed from Brand Y’s Page as well, though Publisher X would first be reminded that the video had been cross-posted by another Page before confirming that it wanted to remove the video from Facebook, according to a Facebook spokesperson.
If my explanation of how this cross-posting works didn’t do it for you or you’re more of a visual learner (me too), Facebook made a video demonstrating the new option:
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