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As you may be aware, Facebook has decided to make a major play for the online video market and it has the potential to shake things up considerably. They have certainly given MUCH more priority to their video than external links, but does that make much of an impact? Can they defeat the mighty YouTube? As this heats up I decided to run some simple tests to see how things shake out. There is no 1 simple way to test engagement so I tried a number of things with different pages (of varying sizes and engagement), after describing the tests, I’ll share some conclusions:
TEST 1 – Lyric Video:
First I posted this video on YouTube, I spread the word through all the usual ways: tweets, e-mail blast, facebook posts, etc. The FB post alone ended up being exposed to almost 2,500 people, however the video sits on YouTube with just under 200 views…not massive by any stretch.
Next I posted the same video on Facebook (keep in mind we have already shared this once before), The post reached a little over 1500 people. This is where Facebook’s data gets a little confusing, the stat they love to show is that the video received approx. 600 views. HOWEVER this is just anyone who saw some tiny part of your video (and includes as far as I can tell, silent auto-play), the drop off rate is REALLY high, as in only 139 people watched after 30 seconds. I would guess those are around the same 90 people who actually clicked to watch and heard the audio. Compare that to the 80% of people who were still engaged long after 30 seconds on YouTube.
TL;DR: Facebook video views look good, but are inflated.
TEST 2 – Live Perfomance Video:
New Page. I posted a fairly simple 2 angle video of live song, didn’t post on YouTube, kept it exclusive. Was happy to discover I could embed the FB post in wordpress, less impressed to discover I couldn’t use the embed code in Mailchimp. So the sharing options were pretty much limited to FB, website and places you could post a straight link like Reddit (as compared to YouTube that you can embed ANYWHERE). 30 shares and 7000 organic reach later, I’m ready to confirm FB is favouring their native video in people’s newsfeeds.
So let’s dig in and check out what percentage is jus un-clicked auto-play. Of the 3,500 views Facebook reports, 900 or so appear to be actual engagement (sticking for longer than 30 seconds), but the drop off rates are still really high compared to YouTube videos. To compare, a similar video by the same band on YouTube has about 400 views with an Audience retention of 80% at 0:30
TL;DR: Facebook does spread videos far and wide, but be wary of the stats
Test #3 – Full Music Video
New artist again. I recently directed a music video for a brand new artist with a fairly limited fan base (approx 1000 FB fans at the time of launch). The artist is still developing their channels, so sharing was pretty much limited to FB, however people really got behind the video. Over 200 shares later, the post had an organic reach of over 30,000 and has brought in a lot of new facebook fans. The views on YouTube are a little north of 3000 with an audience retention of over 90% at the 0:30 mark.
TL;DR: We are safe to say YouTube videos can still be effective on Facebook and elsewhere
CONCLUSIONS
After these and a few other small experiments, I can safely say…we don’t yet know how this will play out. Facebook is certainly ranking their content higher and make it SEEM like they are getting tons more views (see their recent 1 billion views stat), however the majority of these are scrolled by auto-plays. They have some new features coming to their video pages soon (featured videos, playlists, etc.) that may change things, but for now the posts are still very time-sensitive and nothing that is likely to suddenly get new attention in 6 months (which YouTube videos do regularly).
You can’t ignore FB video. It’s coming aggressively, but at this point…I’d lead with your best stuff on YouTube, and post little fan engagement teasers on FB
This post was written by Andrew Jones, editor of Checkered Owl. It originally ran on his blog, but we loved it so much we felt it deserved to shared once more on ours. If you like his work and want to read more of his writing, or if you want to be super cool and offer him full time industry employment, reach out and connect with him on Twitter.
