Video is the driving force on Facebook today and this is something every marketer needs to fully appreciate and leverage.
I am sure many of you are embracing this fact and using video on Facebook as well as on your other online platforms – your website and various social media. An updated study by Quintly uncovered a mind-blowing statistic and if you want your Facebook videos to engage your audience you must take this into account.
Here’s what they found: Facebook native videos are shared far more often than YouTube videos posted to Facebook. Facebook native videos are videos that are created on or directly uploaded to Facebook. YouTube and other videos are posted on Facebook by copying their URL into a status update.
The difference in sharing is startling. According to Quintly, Facebook native videos are shared 1055 percent more than videos posted from other websites, most often YouTube. Why do these videos command such a greater engagement rate than the others? I think the answer is simple: They auto-play within Facebook’s News Feed.
This creates a small dilemma. As an online marketer, you want your videos featured on your YouTube channel, Facebook, your Website, and other places. This leads us to the simple strategy you need to follow when you’re posting videos:
Create your video within Facebook or directly upload it to Facebook: Do not merely copy and paste a video’s URL from another website!
When you do this, you’ll get that coveted “auto-play” and if your content is good, it will grab your audience and they’ll start “liking” and sharing your videos more often on Facebook.
What about the other sites and older YouTube videos?
There are two more wrinkles to cover before we leave this topic. As I said above, you want to post your videos on as many online properties as possible, yet I’ve just given you information that in many ways encourages you to create videos on Facebook. How can you get these videos over to YouTube and your website? Also, how can you get existing YouTube videos posted natively to Facebook?
I go through the steps necessary to accomplish copying Facebook videos to YouTube this in my post How reuse, repurpose Facebook Live videos for your content marketing. There are a few hoops to jump through, but after you’ve done it one time, you’ll get the hang of it.
If you want to go the other way – post YouTube videos as Facebook native videos – there are two possible ways to get this done:
- Grab the original video file (if you still have it) and upload it to Facebook, or
- Download your YouTube video and upload the downloaded file to Facebook.
If you need to download one or more of your videos from your YouTube channel, the process is more involved and you’ll need a third-party tool to get it done. YouTube doesn’t make it easy because there are many copyright issues involved. However, if you’re downloading a video you have created, you own the copyright (unless you’ve copied another creator’s work), so that issue should not be a problem.
Read more on downloading videos
The software to accomplish this changes fairly often but fortunately Eric Griffith has a how-to article on the PC Magazine website that is kept updated, so you can go there to get the latest information.
If you’ve been regularly posting YouTube videos to Facebook via their URL and haven’t seen the engagement rates you’d like to have, switching to Facebook native videos could be the answer.
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