Facebook is competing with YouTube for quite some time and that is why they are now constantly improving Facebook Watch for creators as well as viewers. In the recent update, Facebook has rolled out the “Series” feature to publish episodic content on your pages. With this, you can easily create a series by creating respective seasons an episodes and then publish them. Here you can add episodes in bulk, edit them, and then simply publish them any page you own. The series that you create is fully editable and you can easily add, remove or change the order of the episodes anytime even after you have published it.
Facebook Watch is growing day by day and now with this Series feature, creators can make their content to a whole new level. No matter what ideas you have, you just create a series on it, divide it into seasons, and then add episodes in it, and finally publish it. In the beginning, you can even opt for publishing a trailer too. All this is available right inside the “Content Library” section of Facebook Creator Studio. Not only this, while creating a series, but you can also take advantage of the new bulk upload feature as well. With bulk upload, you can now upload 50 videos at a time and I will explain how you can do that later in this post.
Using Facebook’s Series Feature to Publish Episodic Content:
The “Series” feature is being rolled out to all the pages and you can easily find and use it. But before jumping on how to create a series, have a look at the main 3 advantages of using it.
- User Flow: After you publish a series to your page, your viewers can easily navigate between the seasons and episodes. Also, a series will play in sequence, once an episode ends, the next one starts playing automatically. Also, you can follow a series individually in the same way you follow topics and people.
- Organization: One of the best things about a Series is that is very organized. I have already mentioned about the seasons and episodes. Apart from that, you can opt to post your content in a chronological manner or in an unordered manner, whatever suits your needs. You can publish trailers as well, add a cover image, and icon for the series, etc.
- Discovery: It is very easy to find a series as they appear on the main page. Also, while watching a series, you can discover other similar series that are recommended to you automatically. Series have a unique URL that you can use to share it with your family and friends.
How to Create a Facebook Series?
I assume you are aware of Facebook Creator Studio. This is the best Facebook publishing tool that you can use and the best part is that it is provided to you by Facebook itself. It is free and helps you manage all your pages with ease. To create a series, you will need this. So, just open Facebook Creator Studio and then simply click on the “Content Library”. The “Series” option is displayed there on the left side.
Now, create your first series by giving it a name, description, playback order, cover, and icon. Also, you have to select the Facebook page from the drop-down to which you want to publish it.
After you have created a series, create a new season. To create a season, you will have to specify the season number, season name, description, and cover image. Also, before publishing any season, you can opt to publish a trailer first too.
Now, it is time to add episodes in the series that you’ve just created. Upload the videos from your computer or choose videos already uploaded in the library. Even drafts videos in the library can be added as episodes. Here you can take advantage of the bulk upload feature to upload all episodes at once.
Next, when the episode videos are uploaded, you can edit the description of an individual episode. Add a new thumbnail and even tag people and add a location.
Now, you just save the videos in the drafts and come back to the “All Seasons” page. From here you can publish the series and it will be available on your Facebook page. You can see the following screenshot to understand how it works.
Now, in this way, you can create a Facebook Series and publish that. You can publish as many series as you want and on any page that you own. Do remember that all the series you publish are editable. You can add new episodes in any season and even change their order anytime.
The bottom lines:
Overall I really liked the concept and functionality of Facebook’s Series feature. Series is definitely a better option than publishing playlists and they come with some other advantages. I hope that more makers use this feature and make some interesting content that people love to watch. If you are one of the creators and want to publish a series about anything then I will recommend you to give it a try.
