ABC’s World News Tonight Creates Direct-to-Facebook 1-Minute Newscast

Need more evidence that Facebook video is red hot? Now even a media outlet with more than 9 million daily viewers is jumping on the bandwagon.

Today, ABC’s “World News Tonight with David Muir” launched a short newscast created especially for the Facebook platform. Called “Facecast: The One Thing,” the program will be a one-minute spot produced every weekday, featuring “a round-up of the day’s top stories and trending topics shot behind the scenes at ABC News headquarters in New York City.”

The first installment of what ABC said is the first daily social media newscast hosted by an evening news anchor included bite-sized stories about the Ferguson, Mo.-related protest by St. Louis Rams players, Cyber Monday sales, online Girl Scout cookie marketing and the Star Wars movie trailer:

In the first two-plus hours after publication, the clip had received 50,000 views on Facebook. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to World News Tonight’s audience of 9.2 million for its half-hour television program, but it seems like a smart move for a number of reasons. For one thing, there’s Facebook’s enormous world-wide audience of 1.35 billion. For another, more and more people are consuming news on mobile devices. And probably most importantly, there’s the fact that Facebook is strongly favoring video.

In June, the social network announced that it was adjusting its News Feed algorithm to push more video into people’s stream. Then in September, Facebook announced that it was generating more than 1 billion video views a day, prompting discussion about it overtaking YouTube by some measures.

“Video on Facebook is growing fast and it’s exciting to see ABC and David Muir create unique content for this platform,” Andy Mitchell, Facebook’s director of news and global media partnerships, said in a release. “A newscast produced for the mobile use case is a great way to leverage Facebook’s platform and engage people in the journalism ABC News is known for.”