Should you share your YouTube video on Facebook?
We’ve all heard of Facebook and YouTube…
because they are 2 of the biggest websites and platforms in the world right now and they show no signs of slowing down. You can go to Facebook and see thousands of people interacting with each other in a group, then realize there are millions of groups, and that just means there are billions of registered members there. The same goes for YouTube, there are billions of registered members viewing videos every single day just to waste time or to actually learn something of importance. You can talk to anyone in the world and they’ve heard of both of these websites, but did you know they were battling in the past for video dominance?
The battle for the biggest video platform wasn’t as obvious as you would think,
because we see YouTube as a video sharing platform and Facebook as a social network, but they were butting heads and both wanted to be the main show for video. You would think that it would be YouTube vs. DailyMotion, but it’s not, and that’s solely because of how many people are on Facebook which makes DailyMotion irrelevant in this battle for video domination.
YouTube is owned by Google
If you’ve done your research you already know that Google owns YouTube, which means they are always working on their search algorithms and they don’t really like sharing traffic with other platforms they don’t own. This is why you won’t see as many Facebook videos listed, or any, in the search results when you’re trying to find something on Google. The same goes for Facebook and you won’t easily be able to share a YouTube video, and if you do get to share it, the image or thumbnail will be smaller than anything else around it which decreases the views and click-throughs.
Facebook and YouTube aren’t the best of friends
Both of these companies are working to make themselves better, not each other, and that’s how business goes. You’re not going to go out of your way to help someone else online, especially a competitor, and that’s why it’s more and more difficult to find Facebook videos within YouTube or get traffic to a YouTube video from Facebook.
You may be able to get a YouTube video posted to your wall or page on Facebook, but there are studies that show the views are dramatically less than if you were to just upload the same video directly to Facebook instead of sharing a URL from your YouTube video. These two companies are making sure it’s difficult to share traffic between them, and we’re the only ones that suffer, but it’s not the end of the world.
Both platforms have their own SEO games
SEO isn’t dead, it’s just evolving! The internal search algorithms of Facebook are extremely complex, and people are trying to game them in order to get the most views/likes/followers from their marketing. Google obviously has a massive search algorithm in play, that’s been tweaked over the years, and it’s the main place people go to find information.
Facebook is optimizing for their users while Google is optimizing for everyone in the world, and neither of them wants to share, which is why you won’t be able to do one SEO campaign and hit both of their algorithms at the same time.
Should you upload your videos to Facebook or YouTube?
If you’re making videos and uploading them to various platforms, it’s probably best to upload them to YouTube so you can get more organic traffic. Then if you want to upload your video to Facebook, go for it, but never copy your videos URL and share it on your facebook page or community. You should take the extra step and upload the video to multiple platforms, don’t upload to just YouTube and then share the URL of that video, because you won’t have the same impact.
