Auto-play social video formats enable crafty creatives

Facebook has asserted an obvious "shift to video" in the News Feed whilst Twitter has also announced its plans to enable auto-play videos in the timeline. These signals (and statistics) are distinctly demonstrative of broadcast; the only difference for us as consumers is that we are scrolling through the stream instead of flicking through channels.

The introduction of new formats is really exciting; silent previews need to be compelling enough and contextual to attract the click/view. Content creators need to adapt to these new formats, impulsive scrolling and limited preview time.

A variation of a teaser can be craftily combined with longer or full-length content - merging from click to view. Such interesting edits and versions of videos will essentially be split into two parts or more - the narrative of the creative will have to fit the overall format, which can be adapted to any product or industry.