Will Facebook Online Video Overtake YouTube?
Within the last couple months, Facebook has seen a dramatic increase in its daily video streaming. Users now stream about 4 billions videos on Facebook everyday, which practically happened overnight. As of this year, 70% of all videos on Facebook were uploaded directly to the social networking site, a dramatic increase from the 25% as of February 2014. The surge in online videos being streamed on Facebook will increase the time that users spend on the site; in turn, marketers will be able to reach consumers easier. For the past decade, YouTube has had dominance in the online video platform, so what exactly does Facebook’s increase in online video mean for YouTube? From a marketer’s perspective, is Facebook online video the new YouTube?
Perhaps the appeal of Facebook online video is the ease of use. With the recently updated interface, Facebook engineers have created a platform where sharing and viewing videos is now easier than ever.
However, embedding a video from YouTube directly into a Facebook post is just as simple for the video’s owner as it is for the viewer. Since YouTube is a more established video platform and of better quality, why not house your video in YouTube and take advantage of the ability to share them in-feed on Facebook? Rather than posting a video originally to Facebook, which does not give you the ability to share on YouTube.
Another issue you might run into as a marketer is duplicate content. If you choose to upload the same video to both Facebook and YouTube, you create duplicate content, which goes against Google’s guidelines. While some bigger brands may have the resources to produce two separate videos for their sites, a smaller brand may only have the resources to create one video at a time. So if forced to choose between the two sites, it seems that YouTube still makes the most sense. However, with that being said, it is clearly worthwhile to share YouTube videos on Facebook in the embedded format, which allows users to watch videos directly from their feeds.