Adobe Unveils New Social Publishing Panel for Adobe Media Encoder at Adobe MAX

Out of this year’s Adobe MAX conference held in San Diego, Adobe has announced an upcoming private beta of the all-new Social Publishing panel being added into Premiere Pro. Creative Cloud’s Media Encoder application has long had the ability to directly publish to social channels such as Twitter, Vimeo and YouTube, but Adobe is taking those features to the next level with incredibly granular control over uploads, analytics to measure and determine maximum audience impact and a streamlined workflow.

Control

If there’s one word to describe the current rudimentary implementation of direct-to-social publishing found in Adobe Media Encoder, it’s “clunky.” If you’ve tried to use this feature, as some of us at Streaming Media have attempted in the past, you’ve probably found it to be mildly or grossly frustrating at times. I’ve had videos set to publish after encode only to find failure later. I’ve also spent time entering tags to attach to new videos only to have the application crash and lose all that data I had entered. The new Social Publishing panel in Premiere Pro will attempt to remedy all of that.

First, the amount of data that you can enter for your videos is comparable to what you see when uploading natively on the services’ sites. For example, the YouTube publishing panel will allow you to enter all the basics like description, channel, tags and playlists, but you can also select any frame from your video as a custom thumbnail or upload your own along with the finished encode. This is actually slightly better than you can currently do on YouTube since you can’t choose any video frame as a thumbnail without creating one manually offline first. And forget about losing all those tags if the app crashes or if you have to cancel and start over. You can now save a tag set that can be re-used indefinitely for other videos.

Analytics

Social Publishing will have hooks in all of your social outlets and keep track of your uploads and how each video performs. You can then drill down deep into each video to see what works best for your publishing. What time of day is best for which channel? Which of your channels has more engagement? Is the average watch time higher on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook? All of these questions can be answered from one place in Social Publishing. If you want more detailed information, you can click through all the way down to specific videos to see how they’ve done over time.

Not only will this information be passively available; Social Publishing will provide recommendations based on past performance. When you’re ready to publish that new video, the panel may give you suggestions on where and when to post. This has immense potential since this data has previously been too burdensome for smaller publishers to bother trying to wade through. Now an algorithm can do the heavy lifting for you and let you concentrate on your content and audience engagement.

Workflow

Here’s one of my common scenarios. I have a big 3-5 minute project that I’m preparing to publish in a week. But I want to prepare my audience so they’re anxiously awaiting the finished product. I usually post one or two “trailers” or teasers in the days prior to publishing the final video. Uploading these can be a time suck since each social platform has it’s own requirements and limitations. Social Publishing can now work in “rendition groups” to publish multiple versions simultaneously. You’ll be able to upload different teasers to different channels without setting up each one individually. And when I want to post a :60 to Twitter and a :90 to YouTube, I can rely on Social Publishing to do that for me.

While Social Publishing is in private beta right now, it will likely be opened up to a wider audience after the first of the year, at least in time for Adobe’s usual round of NAB-announced spring updates. If you’re eager to give a try before then, you can apply for access at www.adobe.com/go/socialpublishing.