Facebook’s video content drawing attention away from YouTube

Facebook’s video content drawing attention away from YouTube
Kudos to Hunter Langston who designed this!
Anthony Carranza
10/17/2014
Updated:
4/23/2016

Lots continues to evolve and change in the world of social media networking. As it turns out the once heralded king of video-streaming is now facing an unprecedented challenger. Slowly but surely Google’s platform has seeing a decline around the performance of online videos. According to a blog post by the social media analytics company, Socialbakers, it published Thursday that social media marketers are increasingly turning to native videos posted directly on Facebook.

It is important to realize that Google has vastly expanded, diversified and moved into many other different areas of its business compared to when it started out as a plain search engine. Now in light of the recent turn of events perhaps the company should pay active attention to this latest trend.

Once upon a time businesses from practically every industry was encourage to create a YouTube video along with channel and then share the content on Facebook as a standard practice.

However, the shift means these videos uploaded directly on the social network have a greater organic reach and eliminate some extra steps.

“Back in 2012, marketers were not even considering alternative options for sharing video content on Facebook. The standard process was to create a video, publish it to YouTube and share it via Facebook. However, the recent trend is clearly showing that content marketers are directly uploading video content to Facebook, meaning that Facebook is retaining the traffic at the expense of YouTube,” according to Socialbakers.

In addition to Facebook attracting more traffic because of its video content, YouTube still remains a gatekeeper. For how much longer that is another story. The blog post also highlighted that at the start of 2014 YouTube had twice as many video posts by the likes of other competitors in social media. Nevertheless, there was a 50 percent jump from May through July of this year in favor of the social media company. If this trend continues at its current pace it is projected to surpass YouTube.

Insights and stats about online videos

Video content is naturally a powerful element to utilize in the social media networking world. Posting video footage is a powerful tool that beyond distribution paints a picture quite effectively. In a detailed presentation conducted by the American Internet analytics company, comScore, it went on to explain the nuts and bolts for online videos.

For example, when it analyzed Latin American markets Google sites ranked at the top yet Facebook has started to make substantial gains in several countries. In Brazil and Mexico Google holds barely a lead with just few percentage points ahead of Facebook.

The increasing number of auto-play videos have attracted plenty of attention away from YouTube. As a result in August Facebook toppled Google sites in total number of videos viewed on a desktop in the United States (U.S), according to the comScore report.

In the end, both of these companies will fiercely compete for video advertising market and how Google will counteract remains to be seeing. Whatever the scenarios come about one thing is clear is that the constant evolution of the Facebook platform has started to payoff finally after a sluggish start when it went with its Initial Public Offering (IPO).

Digital Media Journalist! Existing contributor for Examiner and Social Media Today with a track record for web news. A former freelance writer for CBS Local Minnesota. Writing and reporting on the latest social media happenings.
Related Topics