Facebook. YouTube. Which platform should you be posting your dealership’s videos on, and why?
On one hand, Facebook is STILL the most prominent social media platform out there with roughly 2.5 billion users, worldwide – but it also features additional post types in addition to video. YouTube, on the other hand, only boasts about 2 billion users but is the largest video sharing platform out there, and has been the driving force between the global increase in our collective video consumption.Bottom-line, this isn’t an “either-or” situation. It’s not a matter of choosing between Facebook or YouTube. The goal is to use both in the most efficient way possible – while avoiding any redundancies or overlaps that could diminish the impact of your kickass video content.
Videos Shared on Facebook
Let’s start off by clarifying one thing: Facebook is its own entity, while YouTube is owned by Google. Google and YouTube play their own SEO game, while Facebook operates from a completely different playbook. And because of that distinction, there are compatibility issues between the two.This is why a video looks different when you’ve uploaded it natively as a Facebook video, compared to when you’ve shared it on Facebook, using a YouTube link.
Obviously one of these looks more inviting than the other and – let’s be honest – this is most likely a very deliberate move. By presenting the video’s thumbnail at about 6x the size, and in a far more prominent manner, Facebook knows that its users are more likely to view native content than they are to click a link that would navigate them away from Facebook. In addition, there’s autoplay, which increases the likelihood that Facebook users will begin viewing their videos, whether they intend to or not.
Plus, as our regular viewers may remember from our recent discussions of Facebook post types, video posts tend to generate the most engagement of any post types on the platform. This includes link posts, which earn significantly lower engagement. In other words, Facebook’s algorithm simply won’t favor YouTube links, limiting the potential of any YouTube content shared to Facebook. To what extent?
According to one study of Facebook engagement, native video posts get shared 477% more than than YouTube link posts. This also means you can expect a better ROI and a lower cost-per-view on native uploads, if using paid boosts to increase the reach of your videos. So, if Facebook offers such better results, especially in terms of engaging with your dealerships’ local audience, why use YouTube at all?
Videos Shared on YouTube
If we think of Facebook as an efficient means of delivering your valuable content to those who follow your social media page, YouTube is a means of attracting a wider audience through those who don’t. Consider this: there are nearly 5 billion videos viewed on YouTube each and every day. That’s more than 1 billion hours of video content viewed ever 24 hours. And yes, some of those viewers are local, meaning there are plenty of potential new lead opportunities for your dealership just waiting for you to put your content in front of them.
Also, the distinction between the two platforms allows you to introduce new levels to your video content strategy. Remember when we began talking about video content, and the tonal and topical differences between various social media platforms? How a strong content strategy includes different styles of content, each suited to the audience of its respective platform? Well, because of YouTube’s direct relationship with Google, it provides an ideal platform for the publishing of authoritative content. Authoritative content is informational, valuable to those in search of a trustworthy resource and – with proper engagement – such content can help your dealership to rank higher in local search. That’s not to say you can’t post the same content on both your Facebook page and YouTube channel (by all means – to reach the widest possible audience – you should). But don’t be afraid to experiment with your format, adapting it based on what works – and what doesn’t – as communicated to you by the reporting metrics that each platform provides you with.