YouTube & FaceBook: Comparing Apples to Oranges

comparing apples to oranges - youtube and facebook

CLICK ABOVE to Read the full article from The Video Content Marketing Guru!

There has been a propaganda campaign at work that seeks to convince marketers that using direct video uploads to FaceBook is more effective than posting to YouTube and then referencing YouTube videos on the FaceBook platform, but as ReelSEO has written, analysis shows that inflated and misleading statistics are used to support this claim, and the data and natures of these two platforms are too different to even make a clear comparison.

First of all, FaceBook auto-plays videos in a user’s content stream, and any video playing for a few seconds is considered a “view”. This is a significant factor leading to the suddenly inflated number of views being reported on FaceBook. Additionally, these FaceBook video posts may be benefiting from paid promotion. A clear scientific comparison cannot be made to the same videos on YouTube for a number of reasons: The auto-play and paid promotion options on FaceBook are not present in a similar form on YouTube, and any brand or business active on one platform may not be equally active or active at all on another platform, so any reliable statistics not distorted by these FaceBook features would be hard to come by.

There is also the question of Reach versus Engagement… Additionally, how much should these auto-play views even count as reach, when it may not be clear if the viewer ever really saw, noticed, or paid attention to the video that auto-played? It would seem there would need to be at least minimal engagement by the “viewer” for the “view” to have reach. These auto-play videos are more like programming playing on a television that has been left on in a room – The FaceBook user may completely ignore it, or may even see them as a nuisance, like pop-up ads. So, another question may be, “Should auto-played FaceBook videos be categorized as interruption-based media?”

Back to Reach versus Engagement: View count may not be an indicator of success, and inflated view count may be even less so. Targeted, niche views by people who interact and are more likely to convert as a result of engagement with your relevant content are often much more important when it comes to Video Content Marketing.  Question any stats you hear comparing video performance on YouTube and FaceBook.

Read the full ReelSEO article HERE.

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