For a while, YouTube has been a great place for brands to make their mark in their video marketing campaigns. After all, what better place to put all your videos, commercials and whatnot than on a popular video streaming service like YouTube? But according to Socialbakers, a social media analytics provider, more and more brands are skipping YouTube and uploading them directly to Facebook.
Socialbakers has analyzed 180,000 Facebook videos from 20,000 Facebook pages, and they found that there was not just a rise, but a steep rise in the number of marketing videos being uploaded directly to Facebook this year. This is what Socialbakers had to say:
“As the year progressed, we saw content marketers increasingly uploading videos to Facebook directly, with a 50% increase from May through July; and are trending to surpass YouTube by the end of the year.”
At the beginning of 2014, it is illustrated how the gap between Facebook and YouTube (in the number of videos uploaded directly to either site) is narrowing.
When news broke earlier this week from comScore, that the Facebook’s desktop video views had surpassed YouTube, it was said that the only reason this happened was because of Facebook’s autoplay feature. That could potentially explain a lot.
Gian Fulgoni from comScore said that the autoplay feature found on Facebook doesn’t reflect the same engagement represented by YouTube. Even if there are more views on Facebook, that doesn’t mean much. When a video on YouTube is watched, it is because somebody actively and manually had to click on it to view it. That could mean a lot more to a brand then when a video is autoplayed on Facebook.
“While there’s reach advantage for auto-play, there’s an issue as to whether you’re getting good engagement,” said Fulgoni in an interview with Beet.tv, “You’re getting good engagement from user-initiated (video on YouTube) by definition.”
After being analyzing the number of interactions between the two sites, the share of video interactions increased on Facebook and decreased on YouTube.
When it comes down to it, does Facebook really have the same level of engagement as YouTube when it comes to the marketing of videos? Maybe, maybe not. But based on this study, it looks like Facebook is quickly catching up to YouTube and could even become a viable threat to YouTube as a source of video marketing.