Should I Share My Video Via Facebook or YouTube?
This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “Video Sharing: Facebook vs. YouTube.”
The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.
Shayla: Thank you for joining us today for the Shortcut Content Podcast. I’m talking with founder Dave Young. And, Dave, when we want to share a video to Facebook, what do you think about sharing it via YouTube or directly uploading Facebook itself? What are your thoughts on that?
Dave: When you’re producing video for social media, you need to think about the platform that you’re going to share it on at the time you’re getting it ready for that platform. For example, when we look at Facebook and we see all the videos that show up on Facebook, very often as you scroll down, you’ll see, sometimes it’s a YouTube video that you can hit a play button on and it plays right on Facebook, right in the newsfeed. Sometimes you hit it and it opens up a new tab or it takes you somewhere else to play the video, because sometimes people just put an image of video with a play button on and what they are trying to do is get you to go to their website to watch the video. But I think if you’re designing your video to be watch in the Facebook environment, on the Facebook platform, then you should upload a Facebook optimized version of it, directly to Facebook. So that it does play in the feed. It does auto roll, if people have that turned on. I think the other difference is that you can also produce it with closed captioning or even put hard graphics right over the top of it so that people can actually read what’s on your video as it rolls, because a lot of us have the auto play at least turned down. I think like most people, I don’t want video and audio auto playing if there’s somebody in the room that’s a sleep or doing her own thing. I think it’s important that it not just be a YouTube video that you play on Facebook.
I’ve even noticed in an iPad, sometimes when you play video on Facebook, and then you pause it or you stop it or you decide, well, I’ve seen enough and you go back into the Facebook feed, at least on my iPad, that doesn’t always work. Sometimes the audio from a YouTube video just continues to play in the background until you play something else, and it’s annoying. It doesn’t happen if you’re playing a video that’s directly uploaded onto somebody’s Facebook feed though. I don’t think there’s any problem with putting it on YouTube and on Facebook. But I think you want to make sure you’re producing with a mind of putting on Facebook specifically and that means upload the original video as opposed to just embedding a YouTube video. Does that make sense?
Shayla: It does. It kind of sounds like you’re doing whatever you can to make it easier for the person to watch it.
Dave: That’s exactly it and that’s always been my approach on everything related to the web. Think about how you would want to use that video, if it was in your newsfeed. Facebook I think also gives a preference to videos that are uploaded on their platform. I think you see more of those. I think they allow them to be seen by people. So that’s also another factor, but definitely the user experience is huge on that and Facebook gives you a better user experience, if you’re watching a Facebook video, rather than a YouTube or a Vimeo or some other platform.
Shayla: So if you’re navigating all of the different ways you can share your content, that’s what Dave does best. If you have any questions about that, you can find his contact information at ShortcutContent.com.