Believe it or not, Facebook recently surpassed YouTube in video views in the US. Video on Facebook is huge – although the Facebook algorithm is constantly changing, as of the time of this article, Facebook prefers to place video in your feed rather than a plain text post.
Facebook is perpetually changing. And lately, they’ve been changing to help businesses talk to their customers. They offer powerful tools to help your ads and boosted posts hit your target audience, controlling metrics like age, occupation, location, even their interests.
Let’s talk about the pros and cons of uploading your video content directly to Facebook compared to linking from another site, like YouTube…yes, there is a difference!
One of the exciting new features that they’ve added is that videos uploaded directly to Facebook autoplay with out sound in the feed. So when someone is scrolling through their feed and your video post comes up, it automatically starts playing. This is huge for getting customers to want to engage with your content.
On the flip side, videos posted that are linked to YouTube, don’t do that. You just see a thumbnail and you have to click it in order to play it. That’s a lot of work… a person just can’t be expected click all the time, that’s how you get carpal tunnel syndrome.
So by posting your videos directly to Facebook you’re going to see a huge increase in viewership. But bear in mind that Facebook counts a view as an ENTIRE view even if they only watched the first three seconds without turning on the sound.
That being said, you can take advantage of that knowledge and design your videos to immediately be engaging in those first few seconds to intrigue your customers to want to keep watching to find out more.
Your customer is watching video. Whether or not it’s your video, is up to you!