Video Performance on Social Media |Test Don’t Guess
Video Outperforms Everything Marketing
Video performance on social media beats images alone, text alone, and images with text. Live video performance beats everything.
Still, there are implicated “rules” for using video marketing on various platforms that you want to test yourself. If you don’t have proof always ask a question. Even when it makes sense, it pays to test.
You don’t want to take anything for granted. Testing is time consuming I know. It’s so nice to create a system and keep doing it so you’re efficient. But if your system isn’t effective – and you’re not keeping up with the algorithm changes – a system is a problem rather than a solution.
Consider It Done For You
It’s hard to take time to test so I did one for you recently. I’ve done this before and shared results directly to social (Facebook page) but I’m adding these things inside our private groups more recently since of course, you don’t want to share your marketing strategies or questions in public where your customers and clients will see them, right?
Here’s the overarching rule social media marketing experts (and I too) know and share.
Facebook prefers native video (uploaded directly to Facebook) over a shared from another platform video (YouTube for instance).
Facebook wants people to stay on Facebook.
So your Vimeo or Wistia videos aren’t ideal either. And even your URL at the end of a post could hurt your visibility.
But what really happens?
To test anything and isolate what you tested you’ve got to have the same title, content, duration of video to post. So I did. I took a video I’d created, edited in iMovie and uploaded to YouTube. I uploaded it directly to Facebook and shared from YouTube.com within minutes to one of my Facebook business pages.
Then I left them alone.
For my fans it may have been a little weird, possibly irritating, then again not. Remember they are not likely to be hanging out on your page, they’re seeing it in their own timeline as they scroll. Seeing a video twice they’re most likely to think… or yeah, I’ve seen that post. They’re probably not going to call the duplicate content post police on you.
Testing your own results – for video performance or anything else – is important. You really don’t want to assume what’s said is true. Or that what was said in a book or blog once is still true.
Tale of Two Videos
Video 1: Shared from YouTube to Facebook
Posted May 19 9:35am
Video 2: FB Native video
Posted May 19 9:42 am
First check in a few hours later:
YouTube shared video
18 likes
20 shares
4032 reached
Native Facebook video performance
28 likes
14 shares
3423 people reached
Second check in:
(keep in mind the YT video was shared first about 7 minutes before the other video)
YouTube shared to FB
30 likes
23 shares
4039 reached
Native to Facebook
20 likes
15 shares
2382 reached
Last check in May 27 (before this blog post)
YouTube shared to FB
20 Likes
23 shares
4046 reached
Native FB
21 likes
9 shares
2648 reached
So, based on this you could conclude YouTube shared to Facebook is better, or at least equally good. There’s more to consider though.
Take a couple minutes and think through what else might be happening and how to test for that to know for sure.
Think like a marketer who needs to reach the most of a perfect audience and get the most engagement. That’s you, right?
TIP: Formulate your own ideas before you read more. It will help you more than just reading on first.
This is so like junior high science, right? You write up the discussion and conclusion. You can get an “A” if you do those well even if your experiment failed! Always true if you take data from a failure and move forward. Always false if you just stop.
Here are my thoughts:
The “first” video may have done better since my audience saw it first and shared it. Some of my audience members liked them both – but not all that liked the first posted (YouTube) liked the second.
To further test video performance on my page:
- I’d repeat the experiment using (a different video) and post the native FB video first.
- I’d also test whether some verbally spoken instruction/post text to “comment below” or answer a question, tell me your biggest challenge. That will help increase engagement. As it is the videos are just watch for instruction. I haven’t asked viewers to do anything in the video or in the text in the post (always do that!)
These would need to be two different tests. You can only test for one variable at a time to know if it’s working!
Whether you’re creating exercise videos, coaching, or doing a cooking show, video is a marketing asset you want. Optimize your video performance with testing.
For support optimizing your video content, titles, key words, or your platforms, contact me.
I grew a YouTube channel to over 90K with organic traffic and you can too.