Why You Should Start Using Facebook Videos for Marketing

Why You Should Use Facebook Videos

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Video consumption is on a rise. 45% of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos each week. In fact, one-third of online activity is spent watching video.

It’s a great medium for marketing as well. 51% of marketers worldwide named video as the type of content with the highest ROI and marketers who use video can grow revenue up to 49% more than non-video users.

It wasn’t too long ago that YouTube was the king of the hill when it came to online videos. It’s easy to use, has great features, awesome advertising options for social media marketers and creators and has over 1 billion users. Using YouTube to upload and promote your videos was a no brainer.

the rise of social video

If you wanted to share it on Facebook, you uploaded it on YouTube first before sharing your video link on Facebook. That was then, though.

But Facebook is putting a lot of pressure on them with its Facebook videos. In a relatively short amount of time, it has become the second most popular location to upload and promote video content.

From January 2014 to January 2015, the number of videos published on Facebook by U.S. users grew by a whopping 94% while it grew internationally at 75%.

That momentum has not slowed down as the number of daily video views doubled from 4 billion in April 2015 to 8 billion just 6 months later in November 2015.

Perhaps the chart below from SocialBakers would be clearer. They analysed over 180,000 Facebook video posts across 20,000 Facebook  pages and found Facebook’s numbers increasingly rapidly.

share-of-video-posts

Facebook has also announced that it is embarking on a ‘video-first’ strategy. Leading the charge will be Facebook Live and its 360 video tools.

The fight for video will heat up even more in the next few years as Cisco believes that traffic from online video will make up 80% of all Internet consumer traffic.

Considering that Facebook and Google aren’t exactly bosom buddies, it came as no surprise that Facebook is aggressively promoting its videos to YouTube’s detriment.

It introduced several attractive features to native videos that made them stand out more against videos from third party apps (like YouTube). This included a full post display and auto-play.

The results have been quite staggering.

A study by Search Engine Journal attempted to determine the difference in results when videos were uploaded natively on Facebook against using third party apps.

Videos uploaded natively on Facebook had:

  • 814 likes
  • 168 shares
  • 104 comments
  • 181.760 impressions

The YouTube embed received:

  • 342 likes
  • 63 shares
  • 14 comments
  • 88,950 impressions

native facebook video vs youtube

Facebook is giving preference to its native videos compared to third party video embeds. On average, these native videos reach 2x more people, receive 2.6 times more shares and 7.43 times more comments.

Video content will be playing a key role in many marketers’ social media strategy this year. Will you be jumping on board the bandwagon?

[social_warfare]