Facebook Mentions brings new tools for social media managers: mod tools and controls for Live

Continuing its trend of making sure everyone has the latest live video capabilities as we end 2016, Facebook has released a set of new features geared towards celebrities, well-known individuals, and their social media management teams.

Available through the Facebook Mentions app, collaboration between teams has been improved, as has managing comments within broadcasts. Additionally, new controls allow adjustments to video and audio quality to be made during livestreams, and there’s even an option to do post-broadcast editing to provide the optimal playback a brand or celebrity wants.

To say Facebook is excited about livestreaming could be an understatement — it’s obsessed. From advertisements plastered in subway stations to commercials running on television, the social networking company urges you to share what you’re doing with your life in real time. It recently announced support for 360 degree videos in the service, as well as audio-only broadcasts.

Above: Facebook adds team prompt feature to Mentions app so social media managers can better collaborate around broadcasts.

Image Credit: Facebook

Now it’s time for brands and social media teams to get an updated experience, which enables them to create more quality productions. Facebook hopes the new features entice people to do more livestreams on Facebook instead of jumping over to Twitter, whose Periscope Producer service can pull in videos from non-smartphone sources.

Among the first of the series of Facebook updates is improved collaboration and management, streamlining the entire administrative process.

With Team Prompts, social media managers can create draft posts to be reviewed by the public figure they represent before publishing. It also offers scheduling tools so you can set reminders to go live and when content should be published through the Mentions app — think of it as similar to CoTweet and Hootsuite, but specifically for livestreaming.

Above: Blocking comments based on specific keywords.

Image Credit: Facebook

Tags can also be added into live posts to improve the chance of it being discovered through Facebook’s Search tool.

When going live, brands and personalities with a large following could encounter some issues regarding comments. “This interactivity is one of the things that makes Facebook Live so engaging, but we know that public figures want more ways to help manage these comments,” the company said in a blog post.

If you’re famous or just dealing with a polarizing conversation topic — such as the U.S. elections, health care, Apple versus Google, sports, or anything else — you’re going to want to have ways to manage the discussion so it’s productive instead of so antagonistic that everyone loses interest in what you have to say. That’s why Facebook is launching comment moderation so managers can blacklist specific keywords from being shown.

It’s likely that Facebook isn’t done with moderation and will be working on new ways to improve the safety and open conversational aspect people want to have on the social network … hopefully.

Above: Broadcasters can adjust the camera.

Image Credit: Facebook

Facebook has also made available in the Mentions app new tools that can improve the viewing quality of broadcasts while live. There’s now an adjustments tray that allows broadcasters to tweak how the livestream is viewed. Options include the ability to flip the camera horizontally or vertically, adjusting the brightness, and specifying whether to mirror the picture or not. “The mirroring setting is especially useful when the broadcaster wants to showcase certain text or a sponsor logo during a branded content broadcast,” the company explained.

There’s also a new status bar that is being tested with a “small group of people using Mentions” that provides additional controls such as adjusting the audio level, connectivity, and battery status. This batch of features should become available in the coming months.

Lastly, once a broadcast has concluded, there’s now a way to perfect how it’s played back. When you end a livestream, there’s always that awkward part where you might be shown reaching for the end button, or maybe you just want to get rid of some unappealing parts to make your video more professional looking. Facebook has introduced a trimming feature within Mentions that lets broadcasters trim excess footage from the beginning and end of a video.

Trimming is rolling out over the coming weeks.