Facebook Creator – a better way of meaningful content creation or just another Facebook app?

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With its new objective to change mindless video consumption into “time well spent”, Facebook has recently released an app for creators. Facebook Creator provides a wide range of offerings to influencers including new tools for video streaming and story updates, a unified inbox of comments and chats from Instagram and Facebook, a cross-posting platform, broad analytics and page insights. 
Facebook for Creators is supposed to help influencers to grow their fan base through enhancing their content so that it is more meaningful to their followers. The idea for the app  was to provide content creators with one functional platform, from which they would be able to more efficiently manage their online presence making it more personal and interactive.
Although, the goal behind the new Facebook product seems like a big wow, what Facebook failed to mention is that it has long had an app similar to the one they have just released. A celebrity exclusive Facebook Mentions was an app that allowed public figures to monitor their mentions on different social media platforms and to keep in touch with their fans and people they cared about. The app provided similar functionalities as the new Creator App.
As a matter of fact, Facebook Creator has replaced the original Facebook Mentions app, making the new product not so new anymore. What used to be an exclusive platform for celebrities has now become an open and widely available to everyone on the App Store, Creator App. Therefore, instead of coming up with a totally new product as many articles seem to call it, Facebook has only updated and rebranded its original Facebook Mentions.

A Closer look inside Facebook Creator App functionalities

Facebook Live Creative Kit
Special features have been introduced allowing influencers to create custom intros and outros, and to add interactive stickers and custom video frames. Users can also access Facebook camera and story sharing from the app and cross-post to Instagram and Twitter. This last feature is definitely helpful as it might not only save content creators’ time, but also encourage them to build higher-quality content.

 

Communication Tab
A unified inbox between Facebook Messenger and Instagram has been created giving users access to all their messages and notifications on one platform. This streamline feature might help influencers to reduce the time to answer their followers and make it easier to hold a two-way conversations with their fans without the need to bounce between the two apps.

 

Analytics
This feature will help content creators to get insights about their fan base demographics and preferences, as well as possible brands that might be interested in partnership opportunities.
In addition, Facebook has also launched a new website – Facebook for Creators, with a goal to provide content creators with inspiration and learning support. The platform and the app seem like a great way to create a welcoming community of content creators. Facebook has definitely showed their care about the community of independent vloggers, and although Youtube is still Facebook’s biggest competition, the company has taken time advantage with their product launch over the fact that many Youtubers have been experiencing issues with a bot that demonetizes and limits the ads on their videos.

 

Possible Improvements

However, to gather more influencers on the platform, Facebook Creator could think about new ways to help them monetize their content. As for now, content creators are only able to monetize through creating branded content label with Facebook’s partnership tagging feature. This  is extremely limited comparing to Youtube’s monetization options. Therefore, in order for more influencers switching to Creator app, Facebook would need to explore different business models.
Another thing that Facebook Creator could do better is introducing a way to facilitate the communication not only between content creators and their fan base, but also between Facebook groups, so that fans could interact with each other. This might help to better meet Facebook’s goal of bringing people together around their passions.

Sources:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/16/facebook-creator-app/
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/16/16667030/facebook-creator-app-announced-launches
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/14/16648348/youtube-demonetizing-iphone-x-videos
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danafeldman/2017/11/16/facebook-launches-new-app-website-for-creators/#52c2d80a1d98
https://www.facebook.com/creators#app

3 thoughts on “Facebook Creator – a better way of meaningful content creation or just another Facebook app?

  1. Alevtyna Chernykh says:

    Hi, Paulina) Nice article!
    I think this app is not something extraordinary. It is just another app that allows to monitor, edit and organize content on social media. In general, there are lots of other apps that allow to do similar things on Instagram, You Tube and other social platforms, where people are sharing different content. In fact, this is just another tool, which seems to be quite useful to improve the performance of the content creators. And, anyway, people are almost living online, so this app is a very good and helpful option to make it easier living on Facebook. =)

  2. Valerio Pettinicchi says:

    Hi, nice article! It is clear that now Facebook is part of the life of all of us. Every news or update of Facebook does not surprise me anymore. I think it’s in line with the times. Facebook plays an important role nowadays in our society. I have also wrote a post about another ”innovation” introduced by Facebook that is the possibility to use the app for the ”delivery food”. Like this there are and there will be others. I think that Facebook has already, but will have even more in the future an increasingly present role in our society.

  3. Myriam Kijowski-Tran says:

    Paulina,

    Very good innovations from Facebook. But maybe a bit late. The influencers trend is at the top. Giving new tools to them is good, but could have been done before. Nowadays, real influencers do not really need those tools, as they took the habits, or have people helping them. And if they dare to use it, it would anyway not give them new things, they would only benefit from time saving. Moreover, Facebook should, from the beginning, understand that the influencers trend is mostly conducted for money purpose. Creating such an application with a lower monetization options than Youtube is totally insane. It give their influencers the choice to go for better options to the competitor. A bit disappointed that Facebook didn’t though about this main issue. In sum up it’s a good idea but at the wrong time and not complete.

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