Picking between the two giants
After a decade of being the unquestioned leader in the online video market, YouTube, the Google-owned service, has found a formidable rival in Facebook. With the rise of video and film production as an effective content marketing tool, today’s marketers ask: which channel can be best used to present their brands to their audiences – Facebook video or YouTube?
Search vs. Social
YouTube and Facebook are two media platform giants that have different advantages. Search for the former, being under the umbrella of Google; and social for the latter. When trying to discover content, we run to Google and simply search for anything through the use of keywords. Being under the umbrella of Google, YouTube holds the edge when it comes to search as Google can simply favour its channels. That said, when users know what to look for, they can simply try to play with keywords and results including YouTube videos can come up that easy. However, the case seems to be changing recently because of social media. While YouTube remains to be the biggest traffic destination when it comes to videos, Facebook is working to take a larger slice of the pie. In just a short period of time, Facebook videos are seen to be gaining more control in the online video scene. It is not very surprising to know that Facebook will soon take action in turning its attention to videos. As video marketing continues to become popular in the online marketing industry, Facebook’s merger of videos alongside its social media edge is a huge benefit to online marketers and businesses. In today’s case, Facebook feeds the top and recent videos to its users, which makes it possible for people not to turn to search engines just to see the latest and the trending. Through this system, social media gains the momentum when it comes to presenting what’s hot, viral and most viewed. Moreover, let us not forget that YouTube videos are also being viewed through Facebook.
Weighing between the most recent and the permanent content
As marketers, you must carefully study your goals for your digital marketing efforts. Understanding the trade-off between permanence and recency is vital in deciding which channel to place your video as it will measure your video’s ability to hold attention over time. For instance, Facebook Video can help your content gain attention through social media actions such as likes, comments and shares, but it can disappear quickly since recency and social interaction are the only ways to keep your video actively visible on the news feeds. YouTube, on the other hand, can easily be searched even when the video has been posted years back or hasn’t even gained much social actions. The important thing to note on YouTube’s edge in this case is that, your video remains searchable over time and can even gain attention even it is an old content. So in terms of staying power, YouTube takes the lead over Facebook. While if you think you can leave your video’s success on social actions, turn to Facebook. Now, have you decided where to put your brand’s corporate video?
Good news for marketers
Although we try to carefully figure out which is best and more beneficial to our brand, there’s a slightly positive thing that might ease the dilemma of choosing between Facebook video or YouTube. That is, competition between the two video channel giants is actually beneficial to brands that are keen on video production. Simply put, video content creators can in fact take advantage of the emerging online video developments in each channel. With proper planning and strategy, you can be sure that your video production efforts will be optimised. Facebook videos are known to be made to grab the users’ attention, so one thing to do is to create teasers for the Facebook page, and connect them to the full length version via the YouTube channel. This, however, is one of Facebook’s biggest downside against YouTube. While Facebook works to convince marketers to post full videos on the social media channel, users can see gaining more potential on YouTube where the content can be monetised. Will Facebook offer a better arrangement to its video content creators than that of YouTube? We can only wait. But until then, try to work around how your brand can get the most out of the competition. However, if you are more concerned about brand recognition than your video’s record of overall views in each channel, then you could post the same videos on both channels. BuzzFeed does this! Why? Simply because it’s fundamentally more significant to spread your video, gain recognition and increase recommendations in two different channels rather than increase the number of views by staying in just one channel. In the case of BuzzFeed, results have been different, wherein marketing videos on Facebook sometimes result to more views while the same video gathers relatively lower views on YouTube; and sometimes, the other way around when the video is found on YouTube search.
Online video production landscape
By understanding your brand and the online video landscape, you will be able to determine which approach is better. Plan and create a strategy to ensure where your video content will fit in and benefit your brand best. As you plan about your next move, try to leverage on these two biggest video platforms to make your social media marketing efforts a success.
To know more about video production for Youtube & Social Media click here: Kennedy International Studios Video Productions
Start A Project
Fill out the form below for more information
