11 Feb Facebook Videos

Video is clearly the love child of 2015, regardless of platforms.

And Facebook is ahead of the curve embracing the hot medium this year. Video ads have already launched on Facebook. Quite clearly the steps taken is to keep content within the network, rather than diverting traffic out to revenue generating Youtube. I’m just testing it out now and because it’s a new feature Facebook is trying to push, as always early adopters do well. In 2 hours I get more views on the same video that I’ve put on youtube for week now.

There’s an option to select “feature video” which gives prominence to people landing on the page and the number of times the video has been viewed is shown. You might have noticed that your engagement on your Facebook sometimes don’t make sense regardless of your fan numbers, Facebook has started penalising unpaid content, so they simply don’t show up on people’s feeds. There are some ways around it where some brands and agencies make use of content aggregators, just like how Facebook trawls the word “congratulations” and picks up on that because these tend to be life milestones and generates plenty of likes and comments.

By the same token, if a link is shared many times, several times across different accounts, Facebook picks up on it and this content is then given priority visibility which extends the reach of your organic content. A repurposed article that has viral value gains lots of traction and visibility and there are plenty of strategic ways to work the current affairs and ‘hot topics’ into your content editorial calendar.

To illustrate my point, you can see how the same video shared on Facebook has double the views as when it was uploaded on Youtube.

I think it’s probably the way to go to devote a little more time to upload your original content on different platforms, on Youtube and the file directly on Facebook, which it seems genereates more engagement as a social site than sitting on Youtube.

Here’s a great article on how to test, trial and error your way to success on Social Media.

You probably already see several major film companies and brands uploading their videos directly, one of my favourite emotive ads for an e commerce site in Malaysia, Great short film on our Prime Minister’s Facebook page as Singapore celebrates #SG50, 50 years of independence or this cooking infographics video from GE.