Facebook Becoming More Popular Than YouTube For Video Marketing

New research from Socialbakers has found that Facebook is swiftly overtaking YouTube as the channel of choice for video marketers, Marketingland.com reports. The research analysed 180,000 Facebook video posts from 20,000 Facebook pages and found a significant increase in the number of marketing videos being uploaded directly to Facebook in 2014 compared to previous years.

It shows that more marketers are looking to bypass YouTube completely and upload their videos directly to the social media site. There was a 50% increase in this practice from May to July, and it looks set to completely overtake YouTube by the year’s end.

This comes after the news that Facebook recently overtook YouTube for the number of video views made on desktop – in August the social media site surpassed YouTube by one billion views. However, there have been criticisms of this statistic, with professionals stating that Facebook views are not representative of true engagement as there is an auto-play feature on the site. This is different to YouTube views, where video plays are initiated by the user.

Emeritus Gian Fulgoni, the co-founder and executive chairman of ComScore, noted that “while there’s reach advantage for auto-play, there’s an issue as to whether you’re getting good engagement.” He concluded that, by definition, YouTube receives “good engagement” as it is user initiated.

Nevertheless, the research also looked at the number of video interactions between the two sites and found that Facebook actually received an increased share of video interactions, whereas the number for YouTube decreased.