Video is a well-established medium through which to sell your product or service and engage with your audience. Video has a great conversion rate for many online marketers, and YouTube is widely considered to be the dominant platform through which to view and upload video content online. As a referral source, however, Facebook is hot on its heels, particularly since it favours native video uploads over third party embeds, ie. uploading a video directly onto Facebook, rather than simply copy and pasting a YouTube link.

There are many reasons why Facebook is emerging as a great platform for online marketers to upload videos:

  • Auto-play feature: this ensures that your video plays automatically without any interaction necessary and hence, immediately has the opportunity to grab a viewer’s attention.
  • Shareability: Facebook users love to share features, and a good quality video is more likely to be shared than anything else.
  • More traffic: Facebook is a huge social media channel for video content with over 500 million active users and with good tools you can use to find the users you need to target.
  • People spend more time on Facebook: Naturally you want your video content to be uploaded to a place where people spend time, and they are much more likely to come across your video if they are in a place they are comfortable and intend to hang around. Your video, therefore, has fantastic visibility on Facebook, where it can pop up on a user’s timeline, rather than on a platform where they would have to manually search for it If they are not subscribed to your channel.
  • Leading social media channel: Facebook is one of the leading social media channels, particularly for video content. Uploading your video on to Facebook immediately affords it credibility and visibility.
  • Tag friends: As well as targeting a specific audience through Facebook, you can tag users into your video post from which they can also share it; immediately extending your potential post reach.
  • Engagement: Facebook is well-known for generating good engagement on content. There are many ways for users to express their interest in video, from various forms of likes to commenting.

While there are many advantages to uploading videos directly to Facebook, it won’t necessarily do the whole job for you. The video still has to be good and to be able to reach out to a Facebook audience. Our tips in being able to make video content that will appeal:

  • Keep the video short, simple and direct.
  • Optimise the video for Facebook in terms of getting the volume right, adding keywords and a good description, and making sure the video has a good, catchy title.
  • Relate to your audience. In other words, make and present videos that your audience wishes to see. Your content should be tailored to your audience in order to prompt engagement which will hopefully lead to conversions for your business.