Shares of video posts by social media site

Native Video Uploads Out Perform YouTube for Facebook Sharing

“Social media marketers have done more than just walked away from using YouTube for video content – they have sprinted” explains Evan James, Head of North American Marketing for Social Bakers. The company, well known for their social media network statistics and analysis, has revealed some important findings that confirm the fact that Facebook emphasis on video has had tremendous results so far.

“Back in 2012, marketers were not even considering alternative options for sharing video content on Facebook. The standard process was to create a video, publish it to YouTube and share it via Facebook. However, the recent trend is clearly showing that content marketers are directly uploading video content to Facebook, meaning that Facebook is retaining the traffic at the expense of YouTube.”

Facebook’s recent changes placed a big emphasis on native video, and we had already confirmed this trend as we saw Facebook native uploads outperform YouTube with our own clients and their communities. New video ad capabilities, more complete analytics and features such as auto play have all made the Facebook native video option a much more robust way of marketing on Facebook compared to embedding content from a YouTube channel.

share-of-interactions

Not only are Facebook videos reaching more users, but they are also generating more engagement: “We looked at the share of interactions amongst the 120,000 videos and the trend was obvious: The share of interactions increased for Facebook and decreased for YouTube” says James in his report.

This does not mean YouTube is any less valuable as a platform, as it is in fact the world’s biggest destination for video content and loved by the younger generations. However, Facebook’s efforts to boost their native video over YouTube embeds is another clear sign of their overall strategy to make sure the content and marketing dollars stay within their own platform over their competitors. And it’s working.

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Ignacio Cassinelli
nacho.cassinelli@acmconnect.com