Facebook's Slideshow feature emulates video ads on your smartphone without taxing your bandwith

Facebook has been working overtime to reach more users in developing countries. Part of that has been to connect previously untapped markets to the internet for the first time using Free Basics, while the remainder of its efforts are geared towards adapting Facebook to be viable on slower internet connections in developing countries. But all those newly connected users should also be generating the company revenue.

Video ads are the best ads for online, but how do you get people to sit through video ads on data plans with slow load times? The answer to that is Slideshow. It's a new feature Facebook has introduced that creates a pseudo-ad for the social network on mobile platforms. It uses between three to seven still images that the advertiser has uploaded (with appropriate captions), and plays them in a slideshow format with transitions. This helps to seriously reduce the investment on the advertiser's part, seeing as they don't need to spend on a video shoot, and is also much cheaper and faster to load on mobile. The slideshows can be up  to 15 seconds long and, according to Facebook's tests, are about five times smaller in size than a video of the same length.

Brands are already adopting the feature; Coca-Cola ran a slideshow ad on Facebook for mobile in Kenya and Nigeria and reached a 2 million-strong audience. You can expect to start seeing slideshow ads in your Facebook app in the next couple of weeks.