Facebook is adding a feature that lets users track how many times a video has been viewed.

The news comes as the social media company announced it now delivers 1 billion video views per day.

"Video uploaded directly to Facebook is an increasingly important part of News Feed," said Fidjo Simo, Facebook video product director. "And we're just getting started."

A representative from Facebook said the new video count feature would count multiple views by the same person.

Facebook has been pushing video sharing on social media a lot, both in advertisements and in clips uploaded by individuals. The number of views that videos get on Facebook grew by 50 percent from May to July, said the social media giant in a blog post.

The blog post also highlighted the importance of mobile devices in video sharing, with over 65 percent of videos on Facebook being viewed on a mobile device.

With its expanding video features, Facebook is now in direct competition with Google's YouTube. While Google does not provide revenue figures for YouTube, it is estimated the video sharing platform earns more than $1 billion per year. According to Google, over 6 billion hours of video are watched every month on YouTube.

Unlike YouTube, Facebook does not currently serve advertising before a video can be viewed. This could, however, change in the future.

Videos on Facebook use the platform's "Auto-Play" feature, which means a video starts playing automatically when it is scrolled past. Facebook is reportedly changing its algorithms to serve videos that are more relevant to users and it has also started recommending videos to users.

Room for growth in online video watching is huge. Excluding Netflix and adult films, online video watching only accounts for 4 percent of time spent with TV, according to data from comScore and Nielsen. Analysts expect the number of videos being viewed online, as well as video advertising online, to only increase.

Video features on Facebook are likely to continue to change over the next few years, with news-sharing features expected to be included on the platform. If growth of video sharing continues on Facebook, it is likely that the company will monetize it in some way, likely with the addition of ads.