One thing that I hear often and have also seen in a few studies, is that it makes no sense to promote a Video on Facebook. It would only be a flop which would not get any engagement and make the users mad. Well, I can say it is so, in the most used way to share a video, but there is also the other way.

 

As all know, Facebook is not so happy sharing his users with his other fellow friends from the Social landscape or even with the websites of his Business Customers. Facebook has his user base and Facebook wants the users to stay as much as possible on the platform and do as much things as possible there, not anywhere else. Reason is that Businesses are paying for ads targeting active users which are on Facebook at that moment. That’s why everyone has to get on the platform and stay there, Users and Businesses alike.

Business on the other side try to get as much as possible from this user base and bombard it with their stuff, eventually get the users out of Facebook on their own website to convert. They want to have something tangible outside Facebook.

I had to do a campaign involving a Video which was hosted on YouTube, and that’s where we should point the users from Facebook to. Taking into consideration that Facebook is the one having the upper hand in this case and that it wants to have its users inside Facebook being engaged and nowhere else, I started a test to confirm this belief.

The Campaign was much more complex, but we’ll stick to the main actions proving this belief of mine. Between the other actions we’ve taken for this Campaign there were 2 posts, one with the YouTube embed of the Video in Facebook and the other one with the Video upload directly to Facebook. Those two posts have been sponsored with the same amount of money and the same targeting, I made sure that the users who saw these posts were different. (No one looks at the same Video twice, right?)

Results have been amazing and extremely concluding. While one of the posts performed extremely well and had thousands of interactions, the other one hardly acquired few hundred interactions. Which one do you think performed better? Of course, the one where the user base has been engaged solely on Facebook with no interface to another Social Network, in this case, YouTube.

Hey, I have proof. I will not share with you the Video in question, but I will share the results of those two posts. First is the one uploaded on Facebook, the second one is embedded from YouTube.

 

Perfroms very good

How does a Facebook Video Upload Perform

Perfroms very bad

How does a YouTube Video embedded in Facebook perform

 

 

 

 

 

 

The YouTube embed generated about 5000 views while the Facebook Upload generated about 190.000 views. Look at the virality of the Facebook Video Upload, there is no doubt which one is better. Tip: At the end of the day we are talking about reach and engagement of Facebook’s user base on your Company’s content and how this is changing the perception of the User. So, upload your Videos which should go as far as possible and engage as much people as possible on the platform where you run the campaign.

And here we go again, test things, because this is the only way you can see what is working and what not. And please, please, if you are testing, tell me how it went!