Utilize Facebook’s growing video presence
Facebook released data on Sunday charting its growth with videos uploaded to their social media platform, announcing there has been an average of more than one billion video views on their site every day since June of this year.
YouTube last reported four billion views per day back in 2012 and has continued to grow. However, video views on Facebook exceeded 50 percent growth from May to July of this year and also continues to accelerate.
In direct challenge with YouTube, Facebook will now publicize how many views a video receives when uploaded to its site. These will be available on all publicly uploaded videos, from individual users to Pages, making it easy to track the popularity of the post.
While YouTube certainly isn’t dead in the water, this could propose a way for businesses to rethink how they distribute video content. YouTube is useful for uploading the video and sharing across multiple platforms, but would your video be better served if, just for Facebook, it was uploaded directly to the site?
According to the New York Times, that is very much the case. They compared the views of Beyonce’s behind the scenes video from her MTV Video Music Awards performance, which was uploaded directly to her Page and on YouTube. Within the first four hours, the video was viewed 2.4 million times on Facebook and a few thousand times on YouTube.
It’s worth considering for your social media strategy, particularly since Facebook’s product manager Fidgi Simo said in the same article that people on the social network interacted more frequently with video than any other types of posts. Video is aone of the most powerful marketing tools available today.
With that in mind, it’s important to use your videos wisely. Test out a few videos on Facebook versus YouTube and see how the views compare. You may find results that make you rethink your video marketing.
