Facebook video is building a lot of hype, but YouTube is still a better place to post your videos for at least 9 reasons. If you’re wondering about Facebook video vs. YouTube and how the two compare to each other, here’s why YouTube still beats Facebook as a place to post videos. That said, Facebook video has some value that YouTube doesn’t, which I discuss over on my Facebook page.
I want to give you all the top reasons why YouTube crushes Facebook Video and beats it hands down. However, there’s also a video description of this video here on YouTube that goes over to my Facebook page and gives you another video about how Facebook Video actually crushes YouTube as well. But let’s pretend that that doesn’t exist right now and talk about YouTube.
Monetization
Number one. Monetization. There is currently no way on Facebook Video for them to serve ads against your content and for them to do a revenue split with you like you can here on YouTube.
Search
Number two. Search. If that is important for you, there is also currently no way to search videos on Facebook. But here on YouTube, you can publish it, and your video can keep popping up for people time and time and time and time again through search and related videos.
Lifespan
Number three. Kind of going along with that, lifespan of a video on Facebook is very short. If someone scrolls right past it on their news feed, the likelihood of them seeing that video again is fairly low. But on YouTube, your video upload sits in your viewers subscription box until they see it or until it gets pushed out the bottom. And even if that happens, no worries, because it’s very likely, like we said, that can show up in search and related videos and it’s possible for people to find your videos in other ways as well.
Second Largest Search Engine in The World
Number four. YouTube is actually growing faster than Facebook. There’s a lot of stats that go around this, but Google is the number one most trafficked site in the world, and YouTube is the number two largest search engine in the world.
Better Long-form Content
Number five. YouTube is hands down better for long-form content than Facebook. On Facebook people are just looking for really short little clips, mostly highly entertaining stuff, and it’s pretty funny. But on YouTube, you can grow an audience around pretty much anything regardless of if it’s comedy, funny, or not. And your video can be longer than one and a half to two minutes on YouTube and still have great audience retention and still have great engagement.
True Audience Development
Number six. There’s a focus here on YouTube for audience development, for building a channel of subscribers, whereas on Facebook, it’s kind of just more like a passing view in someone’s new feeds because someone shared it or someone’s friend liked it.
Change in Organic Reach
Number seven. On Facebook, you have to pay to promote your posts and your videos to really get them seen by the people who have liked your Facebook page. And while recently Facebook has really favored video and really pushed that up in their algorithm, I personally feel like they are so fickle, they change things all the time, just like they’ve done with text posts, just like they’ve done with photo posts, just like they did with fan pages and lots of things. So it wouldn’t be surprising for me to find out that, like, oh, we’re promoting Facebook Video right now because it’s doing awesome, but we got it, it’s established, and so now you have the start paying to promote those, too.
Facebook Does Not Benefit the Creator
Which is my number eight one in that Facebook just doesn’t seem as trustworthy to me. They change too much, usually for their benefit, not for the benefit of the creator. I don’t actually have any data about that. That’s just me based on the experience that I’ve had with them over the past, well, since they started.
No Notification System in Place
And number nine. Facebook doesn’t really have a way of pushing videos to users in a way that those users really like, whereas YouTube actually has a whole subscription model and method that does push videos to users in a way that they can consume and engage with the content. Now, any one of these things about Facebook video could change over time. They are certainly putting in a lot of time, a lot of effort, into their video product, and I am sure that will continue to grow, perform better, and change as time goes on.
With that said, Facebook Video does have some things going for it that YouTube does not, and there’s a link in the description below that goes over to my Facebook page where you can see my video about how Facebook Video is actually crushing YouTube. So click down there, go check that out, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear from you guys in the comments below. How do you think YouTube is dominating Facebook Video? What are some of the main things that you really like here about YouTube that Facebook Video does not have yet? And let’s increase this list to make YouTube look as awesome as possible.
And for those of you who might not be aware, I am posting regular videos over at facebook.com/videocreators talking about video on Facebook and how to master the Facebook Video platform as a place where we can spread messages that hopefully change lives. So if you want to learn more about Facebook Video, make sure you go over to our Facebook page and click the Like button. Also check that Notifications box so that you get notifications when I actually publish new videos to the page.