Facebook Enhances Second Screen Experience

 

11.16.2014You maybe asking how this affects small business? Currently it probably won’t affect most people reading this post. However, with more live streaming and broadcast happening it could come in to play for many brands. I think it’s very important to keep up to date on what the different social media networks are doing. Also, how they may affect you in the in the future.

Facebook is, I think, taking on Twitter for the real time second screen experience. Right now so many people take to Twitter to talk about their favorite show. This may not change for the time being. Facebook will be giving producers ways to interact with viewers. They are in three areas; Engage, Decide and Display

How is Facebook going to allow people to engage?

  • Media Submission Galleries – Facebook has teamed up with Telescope to let people submit videos to shows. The examples they give are audition videos, video questions and shorts for a film competition. They pointed out that this feature was used for the Aug 6th GOP Debate to get questions. Over 40,000 questions were submitted.
  • Custom Icons – This feature reminds me of Get Glue. A person will be able to check in to watching a show and receive a custom icon on their news feed. It would be a great feature to have since the demise of so many entertainment check in apps.
  • Comments to Air – This will allow you to ask a question on your page and broadcast it on you show. It’s done through third party apps and not a native feature of Facebook.
  • Others – There are other things they are doing with the Mentions app and other third party providers.  These are three I wanted to point out

How is Facebook allowing people to Decide?

  • Voting – Facebook is bringing voting to the platform through the Hashtag Voting API. It will allow people to vote by posting a comment with a specific hash tag. A third party such as Telescope will tally and give results.
  • Polling – Facebook removed this feature from pages last year. This is a bit different than that feature. It will allow real time polling for broadcasts.

How is Facebook allowing you to Display?

  • Curation  – Facebook is allowing broadcasters to put Facebook content in their shows. This is done through Facebook Media API’s.
  • Public Figure API – This makes it easier to find and us content from verified public figures. It will take out the guess work if this is the correct person or a fake page. Which could happen in a live board cast that the wrong page or profile is selected.
  • Graphics – Vizert is making it easier to produce lower thirds, over the shoulder and full screen displays of content from Facebook and Instagram.

These are all made for larger broadcast organizations. Smaller organizations will be able to use these features as more companies start developing for the APIs. It could be that Facebook will make it easier for smaller brands to get more involved. That will be down the road. Most of these service require a third party app to integrate. We should start seeing these implemented very soon!

If you are interested in finding out more. Read the New Broadcast Tools blog post under the Facebook Media section

Tim is the founder of Element33. A social media agency specializing in education, management and strategy for small businesses. He comes from a traditional marketing agency but has embraced all things digital. He considers himself a marketing nerd and believes that all marketing is tied together. This means no matter what silo you are in, social, email, seach, etc, changes in one will affect the other!

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