SYDNEY, Australia -- While it may come as no surprise to some of you, Facebook likes to keep you on Facebook. The simple economics is that the more time you spend viewing Facebook the more time Facebook has to show you advertising. Advertising leads is money in the bank for them.
Many of you are probably doing this already but if you aren’t you should uploading your videos directly to Facebook. Here’s why:
Facebook wants their viewers to stay on Facebook
Facebook has been tirelessly trying to increase engagement and perfect the news feed for personal tastes with a priority of keeping you on their platform to increase advertising opportunities. As such they are much happier to promote a video inside of Facebook than an external link to Youtube, Vimeo or other video hosting platform.
Facebook is rolling out video advertising
The news feed algorithm updates as of early 2014 included additional metrics to track users watching video. Facebook takes into account how often people watch videos, and how long they watch those videos for. These statistics are included to calculate how relevant/entertaining your content is, increasing the likelihood your brand will appear on more and more news feeds.
Facebook videos auto play in the news feed
The first couple of seconds of a video can attract the attention of a viewer who ordinarily might have scrolled past just a screenshot with a play button, this is powerful for getting immediate interest and increase the chance users will interact with your post and have their affinity with your page increased.
Facebook videos are 12x more likely to be shared
A video on Facebook is more likely to be shared than any other content type (i.e Links, Photos, Albums, Text Updates) up to 12x as revealed in a study* conducted last year. The study also found videos receive 40% higher engagement than Youtube links and Facebook video engagement has increased 25% on last year.
Benefits of Facebook Video
Increased engagement with Facebook videos over other video platforms
Video is anchored to your page, allowing all shares, likes and comments to lead back to your page as source
People can tag their friends in Facebook videos to dramatically increase your reach and exposure
Facebook videos will stay in your page video gallery for people to view at any time after posting
Facebook has introduced a ‘More Videos’ carousel to encourage more viewing from your channel
More mobile friendly with less of a disjoint between clicking the video and watching
For more information on the best practices to increase facebook engagement with your audience follow us on Twitter @mpirecreativ (https://twitter.com/mpirecreativ) and on Facebook at fb.com/mpirecreativ (https://www.facebook.com/mpirecreativ)
