YouTube has dominated the online video landscape for years, but that has changed.  We’ve been doing tests with our content and client content and without a doubt Facebook video is killing YouTube in terms of views and engagement.

Views are partially dependent on how many “subscribers” or “followers” you have in a channel.  Marketers and brands can build up their subscribers through a variety of ways on both platforms – both organic and paid.  So if you’ve got a large and engaged audience on YouTube, it’s possible your videos can get engagement larger than on Facebook.

However, Facebook is currently winning due to 2 reasons:

1. Facebook ads are much easier and cheaper to implement than YouTube ads.

The Facebook ads interface, while not simple to get right, is fairly intuitive because it’s integrated into the platform, while YouTube’s is not.  In addition, Facebook does an amazing job at pushing notifications to the advertiser, encouraging them to boost posts or create ads, with notifications in the advertiser’s feed like this:

Notice the big, blue “Boost Post”button? That makes it easy to set up an ad.  Click it and you’ll get a simple pop-up with a few options to finalizing your ad. Easy.

2. The big advantage Facebook has is their data.

Facebook profiles have all sorts of data points (location, likes and dislikes, etc.) which allows marketers to target their audience like no other platform.  Not only is it easier to target but also to push notifications to those targeted profiles.  Advertisers also have the option to put the ads in several places like in the stream or in the right side to ensure they get seen where their audience lives.

One area where Facebook lags is getting interactivity on the video itself.  YouTube allows you to make “Cards”, which are the pop-ups that say things like “Subscribe to my channel” or “Click here to visit my website” or “Click here to view my best videos”.  As Facebook continues to add features, I’m sure this will get better.  In the meantime, YouTube better step up their game because Facebook is a serious threat and one that every marketer should be paying attention to.

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