Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Facebook looks to become media destination

Facebook is planning to make sharing media – from music to videos and more – a bigger part of its site, the Online Publishers Association reported yesterday.

For example, the new feature will allow users' friends to see the videos they access most, watch those same videos, and then share them as well.

The social networking giant is in talks with several online music services, including Spotify, to “develop a tab or widget that would display a user’s most-played songs and provide an easy way for friends to hear them,” according to The New York Times. The same thing would be done for online video and television content a user accesses.

Spotify and Pandora already let users login with their Facebook accounts.

“Imagine if you could see what your friends were watching on Netflix or listening to on Pandora from their Facebook pages. Now imagine if you could also see their recommendations and access their content with a single click. It could turn Facebook into the web’s central hub for multimedia content. Media content and recommendations could give Facebook a new engagement layer that would compel its users to stay on the site for longer,” Mashable's Ben Parr explained.

Facebook, which has almost 700 million users, is already on top when it comes to sharing, according to a new report by Econsultancy, out today. The site produces 38 percent of all sharing traffic, more than blogs and bookmarking services, at 34 percent. Twitter and e-mail each drive 17 percent of sharing referrals.

“For the first time ever, Facebook now accounts for more than half of all content shared, clicks and traffic notwithstanding,” the report stated.

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