Facebook makes a noise about video

Ensuring your videos work when played silently on social media has been one of the golden rules when it comes to social video clips.

But for Facebook that requirement is about to become less important.

(If you haven’t already read our post on why social video is essential, you can do so here)

Because while videos in Facebook’s news feed have until now played silently until tapped on by a user, the social media giant has announced a change in this policy.

Having run tests with sound on and received positive feedback, it is now rolling out this change. It says people have come to expect sound when seeing a video and having their phone volume turned up

However, videos will continue to play without sound where the user has set their phone to silent, or if they disable the feature within Facebook’s settings.

We’ll be interested to see how this changes pans out, having always created video clips with on-screen text or subtitles so the messages could be understood while played silently.

And we wouldn’t expect to change that approach anytime soon as it will still be necessary for posting native video on other social networks such as Twitter.

Unless that is they decide to start making more of a noise about video too.