Digital Marketers Shifting Video Upload Practices From YouTube To Facebook

Social media analytics provider Socialbakers has released the findings from a recent study showing that an increasing number of brands are choosing to bypass YouTube to upload their video content directly to Facebook.

Socialbakers analyzed 180,000 Facebook video posts from 20,000 Facebook pages for its study, and the company has stated its expectation that the number of marketing videos uploaded directly to Facebook will outnumber those added to YouTube by the end of this year.

“One of the most interesting data pulls we have done in a long time shows that YouTube is coming under increasing pressure to maintain its status as the major distributor of video content,” wrote Evan James, Head of North American Marketing at Socialbakers. “Marketers are increasingly turning to Facebook for video content – opting away from the YouTube-first, Facebook second approach that was so common.”

After the recent news from comScore that Facebook’s desktop video views had surpassed YouTube, many marketers were skeptical about whether or not this indicates true engagement, due to Facebook’s autoplay feature. However, in Socialbakers recent study, it analyzed the number of video interactions between the two sites, and the findings were that the share of video interactions increased on Facebook and decreased on YouTube.

There is still the question among marketers as to whether or not Facebook offers the same level of engagement with marketing videos as YouTube, but Socialbakers study clearly illustrates Facebook’s rise in the realm of video content, and YouTube’s longstanding position as the standard for marketing video distribution may be coming to an end.

“At the beginning of 2014, YouTube clearly had the upper hand in regards to the share of number of video posts, nearly doubling that of the nearest contender,” Socialbakers’ announcement continues. “However, as the year progressed, we saw content marketers increasingly uploading videos to Facebook directly, with a 50% increase from May through July; and are trending to surpass YouTube by the end of the year.”

One other question that is being raised by digital marketers is the lack of a powerful search tool for videos on Facebook in comparison to YouTube. The concern is that videos that are uploaded directly to Facebook may be seen initially, but will be quickly buried, whereas the advanced search capabilities of YouTube results in a longer life for video content. However, one thing that’s clear is that the move to Facebook by digital marketers is happening quickly, and the threat to YouTube is unmistakable.

“So what does this all mean?”, writes Socialbakers in its conclusion. “As Facebook has consistently outperformed YouTube in terms of driving views and engagement, content marketers have reacted and have switched to natively published Facebook videos. The subsequent result: YouTube is steadily losing a key distribution platform as content marketers are shifting to Facebook.”