Facebook versus YouTube – best bet for video marketing?

On 2nd June we released the broadbandrating.com “bullet proof broadband” video in which we blasted some routers with a shotgun to monitor the effect. A light hearted bit of advertising for our affiliate marketing site. Thus far on Facebook it has had 2,730 views with a reach of 6,880. Compare this with 55 views on YouTube!

You do have to wonder at where YouTube is going. If we ever have a video to show on a website we always stick it on YouTube because they make it easy for you to embed and it saves on a  lot of server disk space. However it doesn’t really look as if YouTube is necessarily the place if you’re wanting to market something.

When you think about it when do you ever engage with friends on YouTube? Never? It isn’t the same answer on Facebook. Videos posted to Facebook are therefore far more likely to spread virally than YouTube. Certainly in our experience.

In our case there were three factors driving the viewer count. One is the video producer, Tom Davies, has an active community on Facebook, as do I (Tref Davies). Then I posted the video, which was shot at a farm just outside Lincoln, to a Lincoln community group (Your¹ probably from Lincoln if…).

Posting to the group more than doubled the number of views overnight. The group has nearly 18,000 members. You could see the number of views increasing by 20 – 30 a second simply because of the reach of this group.

Content posted to a group has to be valid. In this case the video was footage of Lincoln/Lincolnshire so it was of. You can’t post any video to any group as it will be moderated out.

This does provide food for thought in how to go about getting the most out of social media platforms for your business. Just sticking up something you might want the world to know about isn’t going to work. Put up some genuinely entertaining of interesting stuff and posting it to relevant pages and groups can clearly make a big difference.

I’ve also found this to be the case with individual blog posts. Post to the right group on LinkedIn, for example, and you get a lot more shares. These is a science behind it. If you want to get more exposure it’s really just about putting in the graft and finding the right places to place the content. Of course the content has to be good…

The one other thing you can do is get a celebrity to retweet or share. Their presumably large following has the same effect as posting to a relevant group. People blindly accept that if their heroes say something is worth looking at then they look. Fair play…

PS Happy to hear from folk with different experiences of the two platforms

¹ Their grammatical error not mine