Add videos to Facebook comment sections. Now you can

Facebook has introduced another new feature to its service, one that reaffirms the company’s commitment to video. The ability to add a photo in a FB post’s comments section has been around since 2013, but now that ability has expanded to include video content.

You can leave a video in the comments section the same way you add images: by clicking on the camera button in the comments box. From there, it’s possible to insert a video or record and upload one of your own.

Facebook engineer Bob Baldwin said that the new feature was prototyped in a single day at the company’s 50th Hackathon earlier this year. He added that it came about as a way to enable more engaging and immersive conversations. Now, video joins links, photos, stickers, and emoji as multimedia options that can be included in a post's comments.

Some of the engineers that worked on the new feature had previously built Multimedia Posts, which allows users to post photos and videos together, and many members of the team contributed to Facebook Live.

Introducing the feature was no easy task. “This was no small feat to add support across interfaces and within two heavy traffic services, like comments and videos. That’d be a challenge in a month, let alone a single day,” said Baldwin.

Facebook sees video as the future of online content. User videos are behind the incredible growth of Snapchat, which recently overtook Twitter in number of daily users, and Mark Zuckerberg's company wants to follow the lead of the ephemeral messaging service to stay relevant.

Video comments are avialable on the web, iOS, and Andriod versions of Facebook.