101 Million Reasons Why You Need Promote Your Brand Videos on Facebook and NOT Youtube or Vimeo.

A HUGE pet peeve of mine is when I see a brand put thousands of marketing dollars, time & resources towards a video campaign and then they publish it on either Youtube or Vimeo. BARF. As far as I'm concerned, unless you posting videos for internal communications there is no need to be using Vimeo anymore. #SORRYNOTSORRY but Facebook has done some incredible upgrades to their native Facebook player over the years. Not to mention when you post a vimeo link you have to leave Facebook to watch it....who's got time for that!? Seriously though, our attention spans are so short that generally if the video isn't autoplaying in front of our eyes, it will be scrolled past. I have messaged people who are promoting a cool video on Facebook but through youtube/vimeo to tell them to upload to Facebook. 

For the past 7 years I've been working in marketing making videos. I've been creating branded content from concept, to editing to publishing. Since adding social media to my role at Nurse Next Door I've gained a new perspective on how the videos perform. The results are pretty incredible y'all! Here are the 101...okay, 15 million reasons why you should be focussing your efforts on Facebook video instead of Youtube/Vimeo. 

1. REACH REACH REACH. Did I say reach? When I go through the social media pages that I manage and organize the posts by how much reach & engagement they got, guess which type of post comes up top? 9/10 posts are videos consistently across all the pages I manage. Yep, there's stats behind why video is trending, because it works!
2. Auto-Plays in feeds & grabs your followers attention. Vimeo & Youtube do not do this. 
3. Since Facebook does favour it's own native player to 3rd party players (Youtube & Vimeo) it will place your video in more feeds than if you uploaded a youtube or vimeo link. 
4. Captions. Since 80% of people watch videos WITHOUT sound, captions have become imperative to tell your full story. Instead of manually inserting captions in the video edit itself, you can upload a SRT file directly to Facebook. This is a game changer for people like me that make way too many typo's and grammatical errors. Saves me from exporting the video multiple times. I use a service called Rev.com and they caption the video files only $1 per minute of video with an extremely fast turnaround time (usually a couple of hours). 
5. EMOTION. This isn't necessarily just for Facebook but video is a great opportunity to connect with your clients on an emotional level. A picture can tell a thousand words....but video...1 billion words at least ;)
6. Custom thumbnails Option
7. A "Video View" Facebook ad promotion is only 1-2 cents per view AND you can still add a click through link. This is significantly cheaper than running a "traffic" campaign objective. Great brand awareness for CHEAP. 
8. Let your followers HEAR your tone - literally. 
9. Shares! Think back to the last 3 items you shared on Facebook. Were they links or videos? Maybe I have a slight addiction to baby animal videos *yes I'm THAT girl* but most of the curated stuff I'm seeing from my friends are videos. Unilad & The Dodo have literally taken over my feed and I'm okay with that! LOL
10. Embedding Capabilities 
11. Square videos have more real estate on peoples' screen when they're on Facebook. Since the majority of people are on mobile these days I've tailored my video ratios. 16x9 is beautiful ratio, but gotta take advance of that screen space!
12. You can directly advertise your Facebook videos to Instagram as long as they're under 1 minute in length. 
13. You can get very detailed with who you want to target the video with through FB advertising. For example, I can target my wedding film ad to somebody who got engaged in the last 6 months and has an interest in dog rescue and likes the page "Destination BC" (Hi dream client! lol)
14. The video Facebook ads can now appears in articles outside of Facebook. 
15. Option to retarget people with a video who have visited your website by using Facebook pixel. You can also retarget people that have watched a certain percentage of your other videos. 

OKAY, maybe there is one disadvantage to Facebook video. The search function seriously blows. I've seen some pretty random videos and when I go back to search for them I can never find them. That is why I always post videos to both Facebook & Youtube. I upload to youtube as a back up for SEO purposes.