One of the most interesting data pulls we have done in a long time shows that YouTube is coming under increasing pressure to maintain their status as a major distributor of video content. And where are marketers increasingly going for sharing video content? Yes, that's right, Facebook.
Socialbakers analyzed over 180,000 Facebook video posts across 20,000 Facebook pages and we found that content creators are uploading their videos into Facebook as opposed to using YouTube.
Back in 2012, marketers were not even considering alternative options for sharing video content on Facebook. The standard process was to create a video, publish it to YouTube and share it via Facebook. However, the trend is clearly showing that content marketers are directly uploading video content to Facebook, meaning that Facebook is retaining the traffic at the expense of YouTube.
At the beginning of 2014, YouTube clearly had the upper hand in regards to the share of number of video posts, nearly doubling that of the nearest contender. However, as the year progressed, we saw content marketers increasingly uploading videos to Facebook directly, with a 50% increase from May through July; and are trending to surpass YouTube by the end of the year.
We looked at the share of interactions amongst the 120,000 videos and the trend was obvious: The share of interactions increased for Facebook and decreased for YouTube. This is a serious threat to YouTube as marketers are going to continue to use the network that is most effective for gaining engagement. Basically, there are no signs of the trend reversing from its current path.
So what does this all mean? As Facebook has consistently outperformed YouTube in terms of driving views and engagement, content marketers have reacted and have switched to natively published Facebook videos. The subsequent result, YouTube is steadily losing a key distribution platform as content marketers are shifting to Facebook.