by Kostas Valsamidis, Featured Contributor
HUMAN EYE CAN process images 60 thousand times more quickly than text and 90 per cent of data transmitted towards brain is visually based. Thus, online videos have been exploding in popularity for the past few years and YouTube has consistently been synonymous with online video sharing.
Today, while Youtube is still a major traffic destination for videos, there is a new competitor into the market that is assigned to overtake it. And that competitor is Facebook, that managed in a short period of time, to gain some serious grip in the online video marketing. We can clearly see the power acquired by Facebook, since more and more companies upload videos on their pages, having seconded a huge market share of Youtube. As a matter of fact, lately they overcome, especially in number posts, number views and interaction.
The marketers have significantly turned on Facebook and this phenomenon appears to be spreading rapidly in the video field too. It is worth mentioning the result of a survey of Socialbakers, which analyzed 180.000 Facebook video posts from 20,000 pages of brands, media, entertainment companies and celebrities. These results are really impressive and recorded in the chart below.
We observe that Facebook started to reduce for good the difference with Youtube from last August. And finally in November it surpassed it. The difference between the two social media networks on December- the most competitive month between companies – was quite large, with Facebook being the big winner scoring 20.000 video posts more than Youtube.
Undoubtedly, Youtube a year ago was the dominant video platform with almost twice as many video sharings than any other. However, from January marketers began to show their preference to Facebook, leading to a huge increase (50%) of publications in just four months.
Another factor that deserves to be analyzed is the interaction of users with uploaded videos. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Facebook has a large competitive advantage over Youtube. Perhaps, we could characterize this advantage as a monopoly, since according to the same survey, Facebook gathers 80% of interaction, being the big winner once again as the most engaging network for online videos.
Moreover, after the publication of their profits for the last 4 months, it appears that the largest social networking platform has now three billion video views a day! On September this was just one billion views. Therefore, it is pretty obvious that, within three months Facebook tripled their daily views, which makes us wonder about whether this trend will continue, and if so, where it can reach.
So, what if your brand or business wants to jump into the video action, and lacks the bandwidth to participate on both Facebook and Youtube? Then, which should you choose between these two?
If your business needs to decide between them, the bottom line is your audience. Follow them everywhere and trully understand them. Are they more likely to curate (Facebook) or they just like to view videos (Youtube)? Are you targeting a younger demographic (Facebook) or an older adult group (Youtube)?
And if you still have no idea, always remember that is your audience that will decide where you engage with them. Make sure you have content in both platforms, to test and see where your community is.
Tell us what you think in the comments below. Which one do you prefer for video marketing?