Lights, camera, action: Facebook video

Video use in social media is increasing dramatically, particularly via Facebook, so if you haven’t started using it you should consider adopting it into your social media strategy.
YouTube is the biggest player in online video and the second largest search engine in the world (behind Google). Every minute, 100 hours of video content is being uploaded to the site. Despite this, the key driver of social media video use growth is actually the community adoption of video on Facebook.

Video usage rates soar
Facebook announced in January that users were uploading 75 per cent more videos directly onto the site than the previous year. Half of American users watch at least one video per day on Facebook (similar numbers are expected in Australia). This means that more than 1 billion videos are watched on Facebook alone, every single day. An individual’s newsfeed now contains 360 per cent more video content than it did a year ago.

Facebook targets video
“Video is a very big priority,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call in October. “A lot of the content that people share will be video.”
Facebook has been making big investments into video over the past couple of years. Some changes that they have implemented, which have assisted in the growth of video, are the introduction of the auto play feature and the user view statistics appearing alongside the videos. These might be small things, but they are making the platform much more compatible for video.

Outsmarting the Facebook algorithm
Community engagement and exposure is often the main purpose of a Facebook page. Over the last couple of years the organic reach of posts has dropped significantly due to changes in the Facebook algorithm (the calculations telling you what content you will see in your newsfeed). This trend is expected to continue, and is especially highlighted with content of a promotional nature (“buy this”, “register for our event” or “donate now”), where impressions are drastically lower than natural storytelling content.
The best counter to the algorithm is to create great content that draws a high engagement from your community. Content (video in particular) hosted on Facebook is highly favoured. Consider the difference in how videos are shown on Facebook. If I were to post a YouTube clip on Facebook, it would appear with a preview, and depending on the device, a tap or click to open or expand the video and then it would play.
Videos hosted on Facebook (directly uploaded onto your Facebook page) are favoured by the Facebook algorithm and will enable a greater reach. So if Facebook is part of your communications strategy, it is in your best interest to be posting videos directly onto Facebook.

Our experience
With all that said about video and promotional posts being favoured, the numbers from our Facebook account over time at Connecting Up tell the real story. A video post will generally have a reach of 5–10 times that of a ‘promotional’ post, and 2–3 times that of a photo post. This can fluctuate depending on the content of the photos and video, as just posting video isn’t the cure in itself. However, it is clear that engaging video can take your Facebook presence further in terms of reach.
The takeaway message is this: Facebook is the site where people spend the most time online, so engaging with community members there through video is the perfect opportunity to tell your story and be heard.

Mathan Allington

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