Facebook really, really wants you to post your videos directly to your Page rather than publishing a link to the same video on YouTube. How much do they want you to do it? According to our old friend Beth Becker, and based on her experience running pages for a number of clients, they want it enough to boost engagement rates as much as TEN TIMES over the same video posted as a YouTube link.
Facebook’s goal is to keep us on their playground, of course, so that we can click on ads and otherwise earn them money. Their goal is engagement — Likes, Shares, Comments and attention — and their now-legendary content-display algorithm naturally favors content that generates lots of Likes, Shares and Comments.
Another way to keep you on the site, though, is to prioritize content that’s native to Facebook — images, text and videos that AREN’T a link to something outside of its walls. In the past, if you linked to a YouTube video, it would play natively in Facebook, expanding into a small window on the page. No more: for a video to play within Facebook, you need to post it directly to your Page or profile. And to encourage you to do so, Facebook rewards native video with massively more exposure in your fans’ newsfeeds. Beth’s experiments have shown that this effect routinely yields 7-10 times more engagement over posting a YouTube link.
You should still post videos on YouTube, of course, because the video site has a massive audience of its own (just be sure to title and tag them well, so that they show up searches on there and on Google). But now you should ALSO post (and promote) them on Facebook, or you’ll risk missing a big chunk of potential audience. Yay, more stuff to do…good thing online communicators have nothing but time.
– cpd