In 2014, brands began to take notice of Facebook native video. As of November 2014, Facebook native video made up 80 percent of the total interactions on Facebook video posts according to Socialbakers , a social media analytics and publishing company.
Socialbakers analyzed 20,000 Facebook pages to find that for the first time ever, Facebook page owners uploaded more videos directly to Facebook than they had shared from YouTube. As a result, Facebook pages featuring YouTube videos showed declining user engagement.
According to Facebook’s final quarter results in 2014, the number of Facebook native video views is three billion per day. Compared to one billion native video views in June 2014, one can only assume that native video is rising at an incredibly fast pace.
Statistics from Socialbakers revealed that the share of interactions on native Facebook video posts from January 2014 was 58 percent, compared to YouTube video’s engagement rate of 32 percent. Fast forwarding to November 2014, Facebook video shares increased to 80 percent, while YouTube video shares had declined to just 13 percent.
Video accounts for 78 percent of all web traffic data in the USA alone and is predicted to reach 84 percent by 2018. It’s a trend you simply can’t afford to ignore.
Those who took notice of the Facebook native video trend early on were primarily those in the media industry. Media giants such as CNN, The Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed started to embrace Facebook native video more and more.
ESPN, another early adopter, has had 15 Facebook native videos that logged 53,000+ shares. This volume of shares is significant when compared to its previous 15 YouTube videos, which only logged 6,500 shares.
Essentially, Facebook is optimizing for its own ecosystem by allowing native videos to automatically play within its newsfeed. This leads to more social sharing and user engagement, which brands have taken notice of.
While big media brands have begun to embrace and be rewarded for utilizing Facebook native video, they also need to be reminded of the fact that YouTube is much more than simply a video sharing website. It is the second largest search engine in the world after Google and yields three billion queries every month.
While Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm is sophisticated and its video auto play feature is driving engagement, brands should not rule out YouTube. Its sheer size and scale as a search engine means it will be around for a long time to come. Ultimately, brands will need to keep their feet in both camps for the next couple of years to see if one will dominate over the other.
