Summertime might represent the dog days and doldrums for traditional media, but for Facebook the 3rd quarter slump doesn’t’ apply. The numbers are in, and the unstoppable convergence of social media with online video continued unabated this July with comScore’s Video Metrix reporting Facebook’s ascendancy to #3 in online video viewership only (narrowly) trailing #2 Yahoo! Sites.
At north of 46 million uniques for video viewers in July, Facebook has surpassed MSN’s share of eyeballs and seems poised to take the #2 spot. Here at See3, we can’t help but think back to Facebook’s ascendency to #1 photo sharing site back in 2009 when, despite its obvious limitations and woefully low quality, it blew past Photobucket and Flickr and quickly cemented itself as the top photo site.
So what does this mean for you? Quite simply, it just means that posting your video across your social platform mix, starting with Facebook, should be de rigueur at this point. Period. As sight, sound, and motion improve in quality and sharability so does viewership, so keep those vids coming and not just on your site or your YouTube channel.
What proves trickier is how to present. Note that Facebook’s minutes per viewer for video are only 6% of Google Sites’ (which is to say YouTube) and near the bottom of the rankings among the top 10 overall. We find this disparity pretty predictable actually. It just means that as a poster, you will see more success by tailoring the video you put on Facebook to the “grazer” mentality of its users. If you have a longer running asset, pare it down to something more succinct and easy to watch. TV spots are 30 seconds for a reason; it’s a runtime that holds attention just long enough to keep viewers from migrating away. Same goes for Facebook, where viewers have an onslaught of content to manage and shorter session time to allot their attention across. Don’t have the bandwidth to repurpose your video into something short? Don’t sweat. Posting something is almost always better than posting nothing. Start by checking off the “put it on my social sites” box on every piece of video you post, then work your way towards posting your videos tailored for social platforms from there. Either way, with Facebook now the third largest video site, you can’t miss the opportunity to fish where the fish are.
