Social media analytics provider Socialbakers claims Facebook is quickly becoming the new YouTube for brands.
According to a recent study by the social media analytics provider, more and more brands are bypassing YouTube to upload their video content directly to Facebook.
After analyzing 180,000 Facebook video posts from 20,000 Facebook pages, the study revealed a steep rise this year in the number of marketing videos being uploaded directly to Facebook, as brands opt-out of Google’s YouTube for their marketing video distribution needs.
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.
Going back to the start of 2014, Socialbakers data illustrates how Facebook is narrowing the gap between the number of video posts on its site versus YouTube.
After news broke earlier this week from comScore that Facebook’s desktop video views had surpassed YouTube, many reacted that the video views on Facebook were not a true depiction of engagement because of Facebook’s autoplay feature.
ComScore’s own Gian Fulgoni noted that Facebook’s autoplay does not reflect the same engagement represented by YouTube, where a video view is user-initiated.
“While there’s reach advantage for auto-play, there’s an issue as to whether you’re getting good engagement,” said Fulgoni in an interview with Beet.tv, “You’re getting good engagement from user-initiated (video on YouTube) by definition.”
But, Socialbakers also analyzed the number of video interactions between the two sites, and found that the share of video interactions increased on Facebook, and decreased on YouTube.
While the question remains whether or not Facebook offers the same engagement as YouTube when it comes to marketing videos, there’s no denying the social media site has quickly become a threat to YouTube’s long-standing position as the standard for marketing video distribution.
