A year ago we posted on our blog about Facebook Canvas, user experience, immersive content, and the imminent reign of video.
Well, video is no longer an “up-and-coming” tactic. It’s here, it’s powerful, and it’s all about the brand. Thanks to social platforms putting video first, brand focus has shifted right before our eyes. Not just brand focus, come to think of it – digital focus. The largest video platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube (and Instagram to a lesser extent with the 60 second video limit). Facebook dominates in the full digital scope of video and plans to become entirely video in the next few years, which is already evidenced by the severe decline in text posts and immense increase of video posts. The platforms of distribution for video content online have also shifted. Facebook gets more daily minutes watched than YouTube, and Snapchat daily views are in the billions. Yeah, billions of 5-10 second videos…talk about consumable content.
But YouTube is “The Grandaddy of Video Content.” And yet YouTube is in a downward trend compared to Facebook’s 4 billion daily video streams. It seems no matter how YouTube upgrades UX, file conversions, and even branding, it struggles to keep up with the loads of content competition, primarily from Facebook.
Facebook is the “smart, shareable, and personal” platform. It’s largely accepted as the best way to reach fans at scale. If you’re creating video content for YouTube, and not putting those videos on Facebook as well, your brand is losing distribution and relevancy. Furthermore, it’s important to house your video content on Facebook natively because it places an enormous amount of weight on videos in its timeline algorithm – you have a much higher chance of your video being seen by your community than when linked out. Some additional benefits Facebook provides are:
Last year it seemed Facebook Canvas was the next big thing. More immersive video content had brands and advertisers drooling at the mouth. Now, within a year, it’s become almost expected.
So we at Gragg are doing you a solid. To keep you ahead of the curve: