How Facebook is helping content creators during the pandemic period

The content creator community has gained much more on the Facebook platform beyond the monetisation opportunities. According to Facebook, from 2019 to 2020, the number of content creators earning the equivalent of $10,000 per month grew 88%, while content creators earning $1,000 per month grew 94%.

In March this year, Facebook introduced more avenues for content creators to diversify revenue on the platform. These included earning revenue from short-form video, opening monetisation to more content creators, and accelerating fan support.

The social media giant has not only been helping people stay connected during the pandemic period, but is also helping its growing base of content creators by launching Audio Rooms, video ad options, supporting small businesses and much more.

Commenting on how Facebook has helped as a platform, Maithili Thakur, Indian Singer and Content Creator, said, “Facebook has helped me a lot, especially during the current situation. With people being home-bound, the situation has offered me to deliver my content to them on Facebook. I feel really grateful for this.”

Adding further Thakur said, “The thing that matters the most for creators is that they have to be consistent while posting the content so that they can increase their fan base. The frequency of my videos continues to be the same as before; I go live on my Facebook Page every day at 10 pm. I keep changing my song selections according to the responses received. In fact, the pandemic period also enabled us to get some extra time, which we used to create more videos.”

For Aarti Madan, Professional Chef & Content Creator, more than anything else, Facebook has helped her maintain her sanity. She added, “I realised that people were cooking a lot as they couldn’t order food from outside. So, I started posting one new recipe every single day. Doing the household chores all by ourselves (both me and my husband), and then creating one new recipe video every day wasn’t easy, as it required a lot of hard work and effort. Our day used to start at 7 in the morning and ended at 2-3 am. However, it makes me really happy when people tell me that my content helped them so much during the lockdown.”

Facebook has become a platform to reach new audiences. While on the other platforms the creators’ videos are limited to the people who have chosen to watch them, on Facebook, people discover videos that match their interests. Because of this discovery-based system, it is possible to reach people the creators have never interacted with before.

However, the experience on Facebook – or for that matter on any social media platform – is not always a positive one as heavy trolling and cyber bullying is very much a reality.

Speaking about how a creator can get over trolling and all the nasty criticism, creators of ‘Following Love’, Abhiraj and Niyu, advised, “The best way to deal with trolls is to ignore them. Sometimes they want to project the negativity in their lives on to the creators. And sometimes they are just craving for attention. 99% of the comments that we get on our videos are positive. We would rather focus on the positive comments than focusing on the negatives.”

(Edited and additional inputs by Shanta Saikia)