Facebook has just introduced a new video feature called Say Thanks. The social media giant works hard at increasing video usage and also at consolidating the ties between its users. The new Say Thanks video feature will help people create video cards for their friends to express their gratitude.
Cameron Ewing (design manager at Facebook) and Nick Kwiatek (Facebook engineering manager), took to the web to explain the new Say Thanks video feature:
Share a Say Thanks video with a close friend, your significant other, a relative, a coworker, an old friend — or anyone else in your life who you’d like to celebrate.
To create these cards, you type in Say Thanks in the search box and Facebook will take you to the new Say Thanks video feature page. You have a list of all your friends (the first ones being those with whom you often interact the most) on the left and the video on the right. Facebook automatically combines your content and the content of the person you choose to say thanks to. The video it creates is all automatic, but you can chose to edit the content and choose from different themes before sharing the video.
When you’re done, you can post the video to the person’s Timeline and Facebook will automatically tag people, which means that the video will also show up on their wall.
The new Say Thanks video feature is already mobile-ready and it supports the following languages: English, German, French, Italian, Indonesian, Spanish, Turkish and Portuguese.
Judging from Facebook’s recent developments, it appears that it is increasingly focusing on videos. It recently launched Slingshot, an app that resembles Snapchat that allows its users to share video, text and pictures to their friends.
Facebook also revealed that in the third quarter it averaged more than 1 billion video views a day. Facebook is also rolling out auto-play video ads and it is doing it slowly, to prevent massive user backlash.
When presenting the new Say Thanks video feature, Kwiatek concluded:
Our hope is that people will love it, that it will make them feel good and they will want to share this with their friends.