YouTube Surpasses Facebook: What That Means for You

Compete PRO, a panel that compiles and analyzes the online behavior of millions of U.S. consumers, published some interesting information a few weeks ago saying that YouTube had surpassed Facebook...

Compete PRO, a panel that compiles and analyzes the online behavior of millions of U.S. consumers, published some interesting information a few weeks ago saying that YouTube had surpassed Facebook as the largest social media site. While some people are dubious about the fact that YouTube surpassed Facebook by about 1.4 million unique visitors in June, the real issue is what should you be doing with this information? You should include YouTube in your social media campaign and your PPC advertising campaigns, of course.

Facebook drives traffic to YouTube

Many marketers still fail to recognize YouTube as a social sharing site. Besides the fact that it is a social sharing site in and of itself, pretty much every other social sharing site out there drives traffic to YouTube. Centering your content marketing campaigns around Facebook and Twitter without broadening your campaign net to seize traffic that flows through YouTube is a narrow-minded take on social media, and you are missing out on a ton of exposure.

  • The equivalent of 500 years of YouTube are watched on Facebook daily.
  • 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter every minute.

Those are some big numbers that shouldn’t be ignored. If you have already included YouTube video marketing in your social media campaign, congratulations. You are capitalizing on a competitive advantage that will only last as long as YouTube remains a blind spot for marketers.

If you are still not convinced that YouTube deserves a spot in your social and advertising campaigns, consider this:

Video is increasingly more accessible on mobile

Did you know that 187 million Americans watched 46.6 billion online videos and 28.7 billion video ads in March, according to comScore Video Metrix data. Of that, YouTube generated 11.1 billion views. Furthermore, mobile device video viewing has increased by more than 719% since Q4 2011 (Ooyala, Q4 2013 Video Index). In fact, video viewing on mobile has been rising steadily for close to four years and now has become an essential part of video delivery.

No doubt, YouTube is a big part of this growth. According to YouTube, mobile views make up almost 40% of YouTube’s global watch time.

Screen Shot 2014 08 04 at 3.05.40 PM YouTube Surpasses Facebook: What That Means for You

Again, this is a huge opportunity for marketers as many still fail to see the potential in mobile video.

Post impact vs. video impact

You might have heard about Facebook’s experiment that spilled into mainstream media because it was cited as “evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks.” In it, Facebook tweeked its algorithm to vary how many positive and negative posts from friends test subjects were allowed to see; the study reported that the number of negative words used in status updates increased, which was one of the reasons The New York Times published the article: Facebook Tinkers With Users’ Emotions in News Feed Experiment, Stirring Outcry.”

But if you read the post by Rich Morin, Senior Editor at the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project entitled “Facebook’s experiment causes a lot of fuss for little result,” you will see that in his opinion, the actual impact on Facebook users was miniscule.

On the other hand it can’t be argued that has a huge video impact on its viewers, that’s why over 6 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube each month.

What exactly should you do be doing now?

If you haven’t already figured it out, you should be integrating YouTube into your social media and advertising campaigns.

If you are publishing video to your YouTube channel as part of your social media marketing initiative, be sure you are doing it right.

If you are creating a YouTube advertising campaign, here are some important things to keep in mind TrueView ad formats include search advertising and pre-roll advertising You don’t pay unless the first 30 seconds or more of your video has been watched You can use remarketing techniques using your TrueView advertising, so make sure you have a remarketing list set up Integrate TrueView pre-roll with TrueView search. If a viewer watches your pre-roll and likes it, they will most likely do a search for you on YouTube; making sure you have a TrueView search ad ready will help them easily find you.

Wade Koens

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