When publishing your video to Facebook, VideoRemix creates a Facebook App Tab which hosts your video. It's basically a tab that runs an app which renders the personalized video. The thing is that Facebook app tabs don't work on mobiles. It's a Facebook limitation. As a result , you need to make sure you use the correct links when sharing your video.
This article will show you what links you need to use to make sure your users have a seamless experience, regardless if they're using a desktop or a mobile device.
What happens when you publish a video to Facebook
When you publish a video to Facebook, two things happen. One, a Facebook App Tab is created which hosts your video, and two, a Facebook post is created and posted to your wall or page.
Then the only thing you need to do is use the link to the post in your Facebook ads or in any other channel that drives traffic to your campaign.
Let's look at an example. Look at our Forbes example by going to this url: www.videoremix.io/forbes. You'll notice that the url changes to a Facebook post (see screenshot below).
Viewing a personalized video on Facebook from a desktop
If you are using a desktop device, and click on the post, you will be redirected to a Facebook App Tab that contains the personalized video (see below).
Viewing a personalized video on Facebook from a mobile device
If you are using a mobile device, and click on the post, you will be redirected to the VideoRemix video page. This is basically a full-screen view of your video (see below). We provided this special behavior to work around Facebook's App Tab mobile limitation.
Providing a direct link to your personalized video on Facebook
Sometimes you would want to bypass the Facebook post and include a direct link to the personalized video on Facebook. This is especially useful when you want to direct your visitors straight to the video and avoid the extra click when going through the post. You will want to use this technique when publishing your video as part of an email marketing campaign or as part of a Facebook ad campaign.
You will need to extract the direct link from the Facebook post created by the system. To do that you need to follow the below steps (the below example relates to the Google Chrome browser):
Go to the Facebook post page (www.videoremix.io/forbes in the above example)
Right click on description area (see screenshot below)
Click on the "Copy link address" option to copy the direct link to the clipboard (see screenshot below)
Use that link in your marketing campaigns.
To sum up, Facebook has its quirks when it comes to playing a personalized video, but using the technique mentioned in this article, you could gain the full benefit of using Facebook as a familiar platform, in addition to the flexibility of playing your videos on mobile devices.