Great Social Media Idea: Flipagram on Facebook

A few things:

1) Thank you to everyone for the warm welcome back to the blogosphere. I'm very hopeful to resume regular posting right away.

2) I really was in a black hole for the past few months, so I'm probably behind the times a bit on some of the latest goings on in the social media world.

I mention #2, because I feel like the idea I'm posting today is something that everyone else caught on to a long time ago, and here I am a Johnny (Joey?) Come Lately. But when I logged into my SMFC Facebook page for the first time in a care to admit how long, I noticed that all the top posts were Facebook videos... FB videos that autoplayed (without sound) in the timeline.

And while a lot of schools had posted traditional videos, the one that really stuck out was this photo slideshow from Bethel University.

Post by Bethel University.

I'm not sure if Bethel actually used Flipagram to make this slideshow, but any time I see quickly-moving Instagram pics in a 15 second video, I automatically think Flipagram, probably because it has such a snazzy name. Doesn't it just seem like videos of this sort should be called "Flipagrams" no matter what? I digress.

When this popped up in my feed it seemed like an animated gif, and the auto-play factor definitely favors things that move quickly rather than something that plays as a traditional video. It just seemed like the right type of content for this particular Facebook feature.

And as someone who feels more and more like Facebook is shunning photo albums from pages (I'm not crazy for thinking this - they don't show up on mobile when you visit a page, the album description no longer shows up in news feeds, you can't pay to promote them, and I swear the reach has gone down on them considerably. What gives, FB?), this type of quick photo-montage video is maybe a better option when trying to share a handful of pics than creating an album.

Anyway, like I said - I'm totally behind the times and I need to spend some time doing lots of perusing and building back up a stable of great ideas to share, but this definitely jumped out at me today.

Well done, Bethel!