For the purpose of this study, we have chosen videos that brands have shared across Facebook during the last three months. As you know, there are two options – to either upload the video natively from your computer or to share a link to your video from YouTube. Apparently, admins prefer the latter, with 4 731 YouTube links posted vs. 554 Facebook videos, from December 4th – March 3rd 2013.
Facebook videos tend to have a higher Engagement Rate than YouTube links (0.22% on average compared to 0.10%). As already mentioned in the previous study, this could be due to the fact that you can play Facebook videos directly from the mobile news feed, which is increasingly becoming a preferred way of social update consumption. Interestingly enough, both YouTube links and Facebook videos generate nearly the same fan interaction, with about 77% of Likes, 16% of Shares, and 7% of Comments.
Interestingly, our data shows that Facebook videos achieved a 10 times higher viral reach than YouTube links did! Viral Reach is the percentage of people reached via a user-generated story (like, comment, share). Do you think Facebook videos have an advantage over YouTube links in the news feed? Let us know in the comments section below.
Note: We deliberately omitted paid reach from the graph since it is completely dependent on the marketing budgets of individual companies. The more you pay, the more your post generates reach.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
