Facebook Inc. appears to be positioning itself as a rival to YouTube with new functionality aimed at bringing the media viewing experience on the News Feed more up to par with that offered by Google Inc.’s dominant video sharing website.

The social networking giant is in the process of rolling out a hit counter that will enable users to accurately gauge the popularity of any public video, according to an official blog published over the weekend. Previously, the only way members could check the views on a particular clip was by firing up the Page Insights dashboard, which requires pausing or switching to another tab and doesn’t provide metrics on content from other accounts.

Now, users will be able to see how many hits a specific video has received without having to interrupt their viewing experience. Marketers, meanwhile, stand to gain increased visibility into the competition, knowledge that can be potentially operationalized to further optimize social media campaigns. That increased visibility is becoming especially valuable now that Facebook is ramping up its efforts around video content, which networking kingpin Cisco Systems Inc. predicts will account for 78 percent of all Internet traffic by 2018. The view counter is merely the latest milestone on the company’s journey.

Almost 12 months to the day, Facebook introduced an autoplay feature that  starts a clip as users scroll through their feeds. The company followed up the move in June with the introduction of a recommendation engine that suggests videos based on the interests and viewing history of individual members, functionality that Facebook is currently working on extending to mobile devices.

A full 65 percent of the more than one billion video views Facebook serves every day come from smartphones and tablets, it revealed in conjunction with the launch of the hit counter, making mobile a key driver in its plans to go after YouTube. The latter currently boasts a much larger share of the market with  six billion hours of video served to some one billion unique visitors each month, but it doesn’t include sharing capabilities as robust as Facebook’s. The social networking stalwart is in a position to exploit that functionality edge in order to tap into its 1.2-billion-strong user base for views, a strategy reinforced with every new feature it rolls out.

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