24 Nov Is Facebook Video Stealing YouTube’s Thunder?

I’m sure you’ve noticed your Facebook Newsfeed is now heavily populated with short videos, and people are sharing them like crazy! What does this mean for YouTube?

Socialbakers analyzed over 180,000 Facebook video posts across 20,000 Facebook pages and reported that marketers are increasingly opting away from YouTube and turning to Facebook for video content.

Up until recently, 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.

Among the 180,000 videos analyzed, shares increased for Facebook and decreased for YouTube. Does this mean that YouTube is steadily losing a key distribution platform?

I’m not convinced. You’ve noticed that each video on your newsfeed autoplays while you’re scrolling, whether you stop to watch the video (or even – gasp! – click and listen to the sound!) or keep scrolling. These autoplay views count as engagement.

YouTube remains the second largest search engine, and Facebook videos have one substantial weakness: once they run their very short life, they’re lost to history. Videos are not searchable in Facebook, and that leaves YouTube as king in my book.