Here is Why You Should Start Uploading Videos to Facebook

I have this crazy habit of sharing YouTube videos on Facebook. Each day on my timeline at least one post is a video from YouTube or Vimeo. But, I have noticed lately YouTube clips shared on Facebook are not doing well. They have been substituted by Facebook pages’ videos; that is videos which are directly uploaded on Facebook.

Use Native Facebook Videos to Boost Your Content Marketing Efforts as uploading a video on YouTube then sharing it on Facebook is not working well. Native videos are doing better on Facebook.

Mashable tries to explain this trend; it says “Facebook is at the intersection of the two biggest trends in digital media: mobile and video. Mobile traffic is big and getting bigger, with social media fuelling an even larger piece of that pie than on desktop.

Meanwhile, online video demand outpaces the supply sending prices up, with video consumption and ad spending both projected to steeply rise.”

Facebook’s Improved Features for Videos

The first noticeable difference is Facebook video is that it starts auto playing on newsfeed. Oh! You don’t need these instant views. Not to worry, you can just turn off the auto play option if you dislike it.

You can upload videos directly on Facebook, this is called natively uploading video. These videos look much better as they get a bigger preview on news feed as well as Facebook pages.

Just to test and compare how things work on both YouTube and Facebook I shot a video, and uploaded it on both the sites. I had a lot of fun shooting the video; it wasn’t a pro video but, primarily about me, an amateur video. I uploaded this video on YouTube and shared the link on Facebook, as well as uploaded the same video directly on Facebook. The response, sharing YouTube link was not as effective as native Facebook video. FB pulled in around 6,000 views as compared to sharing YouTube link, which got around 190 views only. Before deleting video, my video uploaded on Facebook reached more people than my video uploaded on YouTube.

The fun doesn’t stop at this, there are more features added to the FB videos which can boost your content marketing efforts and help you reach to wide range of visitors using videos on Facebook. Here they are:

Call to Action

Call to action, CTA can be added to a video, which will link the video to a website of your choice at the end of the video. You can link it to the website to which you wish to drive traffic. But, as of today this feature is not available for users accessing videos on mobile phones.

Tagging

Facebook videos are getting interesting, as you can also tag people in your videos. Your friends will get a notification that they have been tagged, so that the video is seen on their page too. Your videos can go viral because of this.

Pin it up – Pin Your Videos

When your Facebook fans click on the video tab and visit, you can highlight your video in video tab by pinning it to top. You can pin a particular video and make it appear on top making sure that this particular video grabs the most attention from your fans when they are on your fan page. This is especially useful when your fan page has a huge number of daily or weekly visitors.

Things to Remember

• Videos on Facebook are doing better
• Uploading a video on YouTube then sharing it on Facebook is not working well
• Native videos are doing better
• Now you cannot use YouTube videos in promoted posts on Facebook
• If you are a vlogger (video blogger) and YouTube is your primary source of income, you should start experimenting with Facebook NOW
• Always add call to action
• Keep videos be short – 3 minutes is just perfect, lower than that is also ok
• Create and set featured video

Now get into the grind, shoot a short video and share it on Facebook. Have fun with the new feature.