How Facebook Impacts Online Marketing with Videos and Why It Is Better than YouTube

Uploading videos is one of the most engaging tools that are used by brands on social media networks. Videos are very effective for creating a viral effect and buzz, in addition to building brand awareness. According to Shareaholic Social Media Traffic Report, social media referrals coming from Facebook are four times higher than other major social media channels. The report analyzes the eight most popular social media networks on the Internet including Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter over a four month period in 2014 (June 2014-September 2014).

The report shows that Facebook delivered approximately a quarter of the total website visits. The difference between Facebook and its competition is so impressive that authors stressed the importance of having online presence on the top three social media networks such as Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. However, LinkedIn and Google Plus are the only networks that showed an increase in social media traffic referrals.

Facebook has proven to be the most effective channel for content distribution and its video feature is becoming more popular. In the past, marketers were creating videos on YouTube and shared them on other social media sites. Content marketers were considering YouTube as the only video-sharing platform. But recently this has changed. Video content has become a major focus for Facebook and today content marketers are more likely to upload directly on Facebook, at the expense of YouTube.

In a survey across 20000 Facebook pages conducted by Socialbakers, a social media software and analytics company showed that marketers directly uploaded nearly 50% more videos on Facebook in June 2014 than they did in January 2014.

As we can see from the chart above, YouTube was the most powerful video-sharing platform. With the update to its video product, Facebook enabled its 1.35 billion users to upload videos, and provided business pages with comprehensive analytics that show how many views their videos received. Facebook showed advertisers and its competitors, including Google’s dominant online video service YouTube, its strength to attract the viewers. Coupled with its acquisition of LiveRail, a video ad-technology company and the introduction of Autoplay video ads, Facebook appears to surpass YouTube in the online video industry. Facebook has also changed its news feed algorithm, so people who are regularly watching videos will see more of the video content at the top of their news feed. Well suited for rich content, images and videos, Facebook offers countless opportunities for mobile engagement as well.

Located in Toronto, Canada but servicing students and social media executives globally, Digital Media Academy of Canada offers online social media courses which help you to create engaging content posts and gain digital marketing skills to help you thrive in the social media marketing industry.