Facebook will increase your Total Reach if you let them host the video.
When it comes to amplifying my message with social media, most kitten pictures get more attention than my tweets. Even with my low penetration from “shares”, “likes” and “retweets”, I still look at my statistics to see what might be working. While reviewing the paltry statistics of my Facebook Page, I noticed a video I happened to upload on my Facebook business page that received eight times more reach than my blogs I post to the same page.
Sharing helps improve Reach
When ever I write a blog post I post it to my FB page and then “like” it and “share” on my personal FB account. Since I have four times as many friends as I do “Likes” for my page (I don’t blame people for not liking a page devoted to health insurance), I figure sharing will get a few more views. Not only does the sharing reach more people, if the content is actually hosted by Facebook they are putting the content into my friends Facebook feeds more than external links.
Total Reach doesn’t equal Total Views
Facebook measures how often your post showed up in someone’s feed as “Total Reach”. That doesn’t mean your friend actually opened the link and viewed the content. For a post to increase its Total Reach beyond just sharing it once, it needs to be shared again by the original poster, friends or by Facebook inserting it people’s feeds after the initial post.
Facebook promotes videos you upload and they host
I happened to make a very low grade video about health insurance more as a way to learn Microsoft Movie Maker as opposed to creating a stellar work of art. Because the video was specifically about health insurance I decided to upload it to my FB fan page and did my normal sharing routine on my personal FB page. I was surprised when the FB page reported that the video was shown to eight times as many people as a normal status update or YouTube video share on the page.
Cat videos outperform Pulitzer prize winning literature
Hosted Facebook video content consistently has a higher total reach than the blogs I share from my website, the photo albums I create and share on the Facebook page or external links for on-line articles. A video link to my YouTube account or a TV news clip does no better than a regular external link to a text based story. Facebook prefers videos you upload to your page and they get to host. They will then make sure that video pops up in more than the usual number of feeds.
Testing the hypothesis
I did a little test over about a week of posting both external links and uploading one short video to the site. After each posting to the business page I liked and shared on my personal page. The posts occurred at different times of the day, morning, afternoon, and evening. In all but one upload, the Facebook hosted video content was shown to twice as many people as an external link. Even an external video link received no special treatment. Only videos uploaded to Facebook were promoted to a larger audience.
Hosted Facebook videos out perform my own blogs posted to my page, noted with red circles.
More views with search engines
Facebook has a problem in that the content is not available outside of Facebook. So even if you have 5,000 friends and followers that will never compete with the World Wide Web for total number of potential views with an Internet search. From a business perspective, why should anyone bother loading their page up with content hosted by Facebook when the viewership is automatically small?
Post Facebook videos, reach more people
There are people behind the scenes that understand better than I how Facebook determines which ‘status updates” to promote over others. Clearly, Facebook has decided to give their Pages a boost in viewership if the page owner lets them host the video content. All I know is that I will be posting more videos. But will cat videos out perform a health insurance recording? We shall see.