Content Producers Rejoice, Creation Comes To Creator Studio App

Over the past year or so, Facebook has been building out and developing its Creator Studio.

Creator Studio brings together all the tools you need to effectively post, manage, monetise and measure content across all your Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts.

Tools which previously were scattered around the Facebook marketing ecosystem. For example, some were native to the Instagram app, some lived randomly within Facebook Business Manager, while some lived in the Facebook Page admin interface, etc.

Further aiming to streamline content creation across the Facebook ecosystem, Facebook launched the Creator Studio app to aid on-the-fly production at the start of 2020.

Disappointingly, however, at launch, the app did not allow for content creation.

Something of a flaw, given the name of the app, probably explaining, it's 2-star app-store rating.

Thankfully, four months after launching, it is now possible to do the once unthinkable and actually create content from the Creator Studio app.

90's starlet Gabrielle was spot-on… dreams can come true.

Victoria Limary, Product Manager for Creator and Publisher Experience

"The Creator Studio app is starting to roll out a brand-new experience for creators who want to manage their content on the go.

With this update, you can now publish and schedule Facebook posts within the same Creator Studio app where you check content insights and respond to your fans' messages and comments."

Try it today by downloading Creator Studio for iOS or Android.

Post Creation, Scheduling, Edits & Analytics

The latest app update sees Creator Studio finally live up to its name and allow post creation and scheduling.

In addition to this, Facebook has introduced more features for video posts:

• Video metadata fields – Add a title and description to your videos to give viewers more information about your content and entice them to watch.
• Thumbnail selection – Upload a thumbnail from your mobile phone's library or use our thumbnail selector to pick one from the video you've uploaded

In adding content creation and scheduling to the Creator Studio app, this compliments quite an array of existing features, including:

• Rich insights: Data and engagement metrics about how content is performing, such as "1-minute views" and "Avg. minutes viewed"
• Post-uploading edits and fixes: Ability to edit video titles and descriptions, delete and expire posts, publish drafted posts and reschedule scheduled posts, enabling easy content adjustments
• Connect with audiences: Reach fans and followers in real-time, from anywhere with the ability to read and respond to Facebook messages and comments using Inbox directly in the app
• Multi-account support: Manage multiple Pages on Facebook and toggle between them from the same app in the same session – no need to log out of one to log in to another to access multiple Pages
• Notifications: Immediate in-app notifications for key milestones

While this a welcome update from Facebook for content producers, it does not detract from the fact that even on a good day, Creator Studio is very buggy.

Hence the daily Hail Mary's when saving, editing, scheduling content or breathing near Creator Studio.

Facebook's Creator Studio Focus & Instagram Integration

The Creator Studio's reputation for bugginess has prompted many on the coalface of social media marketing to circumnavigate where possible.

Crafting posts natively via their Facebook Page or Instagram account, and using thrid party tools.

However, in recent times, Facebook has been quietly stripping back native production functionality. For example, within the Page admin interface, Publishing Tools have now been largely migrated to Creator Studio.

While a Creator Studio shortcut has been shoe-horned into the main Page admin menu.

In mid-2019, Instagram finally integrated with Creator Studio, bringing the ability to manage all of your Instagram posts and get insights on desktop. Including the ability to schedule Instagram posts and IGTV content.

To connect your Instagram account and your Facebook Page, you first need to be an admin of that Page on Facebook, while the Instagram account must be a business profile or creator account.

Admins and editors of a Facebook Page can use Creator Studio to post Instagram content to any Instagram accounts linked to that Page. They can also edit or delete existing posts made by any Instagram accounts linked to that Page, as well as share Instagram posts to a Facebook Page. 

As per Facebook, in time, more and more Instagram content production and analysis will shift to Creator Studio. If you're not really down with Creator Studio for Instagram, enjoy your third party and native tools while you can…