- Audience – Facebook is the 2nd largest trafficked website, with over 500 million active users.
- Referrals – Facebook is the 2nd largest referral source for video.
- Mobile – 150 million active users take Facebook with them everywhere they go.
- Time – Many people spend a lot more time on Facebook than on Google
- Versatility – Many video formats are supported for uploading
- Length – Facebook allows up to 20 minutes, 5 minutes more than YouTube
- Connectivity – A wide range of sharing features and engagement opportunities. While Facebook doesn’t let you share it’s content onto other social networks (like YouTube and Twitter), because of its large member base, you will certainly have many more connections from the onset that may lead to better sharing potential.
- Search Engine Visibility – Facebook videos are visible within Google Search.
- SMO (Social Media Optimization) – Excellent keyword encoding (aka, “tagging”) capabilities.
- Conversions – Hot triggers around the video for taking an intended action.
Facebook Value Vs. YouTube?
If you’re only going by video alone, we could probably mention 50 reasons why YouTube is a more robust and valuable platform for video than Facebook. However, as an overall marketing platform, Facebook is arguably more valuable than YouTube for many businesses. So while we would not treat Facebook video as an equivalent business value to YouTube – we completely agree that it should be a place for businesses to upload videos. At ReelSEO, we try to upload all of ours because they do show in search engine listings.
Video Marketing In Facebook – Better Business Opportunity?
Michael Stelzner, founder of SocialMediaExaminer.com explains the power of Facebook.
One of the things that most people don’t realize is how much time people spend on Facebook. According to the traffic ranking information service Alexa, Facebook is the second largest website in the world, with over 500 million active users; also,
Facebook is the 2nd largest referral source for online video – just behind Google.
If you think about it,
people today spend a lot more time on Facebook than they do on Google. Some of the
Nielsen studies I’ve seen show that people are spending an average of seven hours a month on Facebook; that’s a lot of time spent.
Also, According to recent findings by market researcher
Morpace,
U.
S. Facebook users are on the site for 1 of every 3 minutes of time spent online. Users 18 to 34 years old spend the most time on the site per week (8.5 hours out of 22.4 spent online). Users 55 and older spend an average of 4.6 hours per week on Facebook.
So if you think about the fact that people are on there that much, it opens up an incredible opportunity for a business to try to get in front of these 500 million active users; and what’s even more exciting is that about 150 million of them take Facebook with them everywhere they go – on a mobile device like an iPhone, iPad, or an Android device.
Facebook is one of the top sources for consumed video (and photography as well). We also know that
many people on Facebook are constantly checking out what’s going on with their favorite friends, and also their favorite brands. This represents a huge opportunity to capture eye-share with videos in particular on Facebook. One of the hottest ways to just get your business noticed today is to use Facebook, and of course to leverage video marketing in there as well.
Recording Video Directly In Facebook – Good Or Bad?
The first thing is how video is integrated directly into the interface of Facebook. When you put in an update on Facebook, there’s an option to click to record a video. The downside of it is most people don’t use it, and those who have used it have had kind of a mixed response. Facebook can capture the video directly from your computer’s webcam, but doing that results in very poor technical quality; somehow they’re running the video through algorithms that makes it look just hideous. But the upside is it does allow people to record spontaneous video responses to comments on Facebook, and that’s kind of an exciting thing.
Linking YouTube Videos In Facebook Vs. Uploading
Mike: The other confusing thing about video with Facebook is whether or not to use YouTube links or whether or not to actually upload video directly into Facebook. Facebook has done something kind of interesting: If you go ahead and embed a link to YouTube, it will embed the player directly into the Facebook feed. Somebody can actually watch that video through Facebook, force-fed from YouTube just like if you were putting it up on a blog.
But the more powerful aspect is actually uploading the video directly
to Facebook. Facebook has the ability to support a lot more formats and has a lot longer formats where YouTube is I think it’s now up to about 15 minutes, Facebook can go significantly longer. (20 minutes.)
The other cool thing about Facebook video is that people can easily share Facebook videos, where they cannot easily share YouTube videos. And in Facebook, others can not only comment on a video, they can also “like” a video (which will then show up in their own Wall page, aka Facebook home page), and can tag a video with their own keywords; and there’s a lot of other cool stuff.
Embedding Video In Your Facebook Page – “Secret Sauce”
Another powerful Facebook business strategy with video. Let’s say you have a business with a Facebook “fan” page, with a video uploaded to that page. Now, someone on Facebook – who is not yet one of your fans – can still watch that video’ and if they hover their mouse over the video there’s a button that says “like”, and they can become a fan of your Facebook page, just by clicking that button inline while they’re watching the video.
It’s kind of the secret sauce to gaining fans.
Intel corporation does this quite a bit on it’s own Facebook site. It’s really a very easy way to gain fans because if they really like a video, they can click on it; and they think they’re just liking the video, but they actually now become fans of your fan page, and that future engagement opportunity is there.
Tagging Videos In Facebook – SMO “Social Media Optimization”
The good news about Facebook video is
you do have a lot of encoding keyword encoding capabilities, just like you do with YouTube. When you have a video with other people in it, if you’re friends with them you can tag them just like you can do with a photograph.
Most people don’t realize that in the videos on Facebook, you can tag people in the videos as keywords, and add your own keywords.
What’s really cool about that is when you do tag someone in your video, then that video actually shows up on
their wall for
their friends. And
it’s not just for videos of people. I believe you can also tag videos of businesses as well, which is another powerful thing.
Powerful Facebook Video Marketing Tip: Video Landing Pages
If you have a Facebook page you can set up what’s called a landing page on Facebook. What I’ve seen a lot of businesses do is
record a welcome video, where it’s usually a talking head of the company welcoming them to the actual fan page, and sometimes pointing up and saying, “if you like our page please click the like button.” So the Facebook landing page is actually encouraging the viewer to act through the spoken talking heads in the video telling them what to do.
We found the engagement and conversion to be very, very high because you’re actually telling people what to do in video. That’s a little but powerful tip with video on Facebook, that most people don’t realize you can do.
-Grant Cowell, ReelSEO and Social Media Examiner
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