More and more, people are uploading, sharing and discovering videos on Facebook. Video views grew more than 50% from May through July of this year, and since June there has been an average of more than 1 billion video views on Facebook each day.

For marketers, digital video, particularly on mobile, is becoming more important as well. Combining sight, sound and motion, video creates experiences that are, at their best, memorable, moving and inspiring — the types of experiences that help brand marketers drive important metrics, including awareness, consideration and, ultimately, sales.

At Facebook we’re continuing to invest heavily in our video products for marketers. Today we’d like to share some new features we’re adding to video ads.

After introducing videos that start playing automatically in News Feed earlier this year, we’ve found that people discover significantly more content with this feature. And when used in combination with our new video views objective, businesses are seeing a significant decrease in cost per view for their Facebook video ads. So in the coming weeks, we’ll extend the availability of videos that play automatically to more content from more brands in the US.¹

“Using videos we uploaded to Facebook during Fashion Week in February, we saw an 85X lift in view rates versus our previous Fashion Week campaign, which linked to videos from other players. This fall we will begin tapping into the new video views objective, and our ads are now eligible to automatically play in News Feed. Facebook is and will continue to be a key part of our video marketing strategy going forward.” — Jen Daly, Senior Brand Building Manager, TRESemmé & Nexxus, Unilever

People will also begin to see how many views a video on Facebook has received. Views will be shown on all public videos from people and Pages. We believe this will help people discover popular videos, and help businesses quickly gather information about how their videos are performing.

We know that video viewing is exploding around the world, and much of this growth is being powered by mobile devices. In a recent white paper, Why Mobile is Essential for Brand Marketers, Altimeter’s Rebecca Lieb writes, “Mobile today equals mass media, a trend that offers brand marketers unprecedented opportunities to connect with people in incredibly personal ways on devices that are by their sides nearly 24/7.”

These factors present a clear opportunity for brands, particularly those that advertise on Facebook, where more than 65% of our video views are happening on mobile.

“Facebook has become a serious platform for brand-building, and video is leading the way. When it comes to video ads for our clients, based on engagement rate, cost per view, view-to-completion and reach, right now Facebook is winning by a landslide.” — Jason Stein, CEO of ad agency Laundry Service, whose clients include Nike, Amazon and Michael Kors

We’re excited about the progress we’ve made with video, and are committed to building more tools to help marketers of every size take advantage of video’s power on Facebook. We’ll share more about video in the coming months.