Youtube Spars with Facebook in Video Marketing Bout

As dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing has evolved in recent years, pro­duc­ing video mate­r­i­al has become increas­ing­ly impor­tant. Every dig­i­tal mar­keter worth his or her salt today knows that pro­duc­ing absorb­ing video con­tent which tru­ly reels con­sumers in should be con­sid­ered an essen­tial facet of a mar­ket­ing cam­paign. And the key mil­len­ni­al gen­er­a­tion has been shown to be sta­tis­ti­cal­ly far more attract­ed to video than any oth­er form of con­tent (although engag­ing pho­tographs can also very suc­cess­ful­ly attract this group).

At the same time as video is becom­ing such an impor­tant mar­ket­ing tool, it is also impor­tant to empha­sise that the social media sphere is becom­ing more com­plex. Social media mar­ket­ing has become a cen­tral aspect of the dig­i­tal approach, and it is an excel­lent way to ensure that con­tent becomes viral very quickly.

Dom­i­nant Social Platforms

With this in mind, three social video plat­forms have pre­vi­ous­ly been incred­i­bly dom­i­nant. Face­book, Twit­ter and YouTube all attract vast amounts of traf­fic, and although they have had vary­ing degrees of suc­cess in achiev­ing prof­itabil­i­ty, the future of these three sites appears extreme­ly secure.

How­ev­er, at the same time the big three are increas­ing­ly being chal­lenged by the new social media plu­ral­i­ty. Social media plat­forms such as Insta­gram, Snapchat and LinkedIn have achieved rapid growth in a short peri­od of time, and a con­tem­po­rary mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy must now take these young upstarts into con­sid­er­a­tion. And at the same time, the exist­ing heavy­weights of the social media and video sphere are attempt­ing to reassert their predominance.

Face­book Expands Video Operation

Recent ini­tia­tives that Face­book has entered into indi­cate that the social media site, , is intend­ing to take YouTube head-on in the bat­tle for video suprema­cy. This might seem like some­thing of a los­ing bat­tle con­sid­er­ing the mar­ket pen­e­tra­tion of YouTube, and also the fact that peo­ple sole­ly vis­it the YouTube site in order to view videos. Face­book has cer­tain­ly become asso­ci­at­ed with video to a cer­tain extent, but its over­all con­tent is obvi­ous­ly more diverse than YouTube.

YouTube has become so suc­cess­ful with attract­ing peo­ple to cre­ate their own per­son­al life view­ing expe­ri­ences that it is cur­rent­ly con­sid­ered to be the sec­ond largest search engine in the world. Once YouTube has attract­ed peo­ple to the web­site, it has been proven sta­tis­ti­cal­ly that dis­play­ing relat­ed con­tent can still dri­ve dis­cov­ery more than any oth­er aspect of engagement.

So Face­book is play­ing catch-up to a cer­tain extent, and has a slight­ly dif­fer­ent approach to video. Face­book effec­tive­ly choos­es videos for its users, with the select­ed mate­r­i­al dis­played in the news­feed on an individual’s Face­book home­page. Face­book has moved in recent months and years to ensure that video is a more cen­tral part of the Face­book expe­ri­ence, but there is one fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence to YouTube. Search­ing for video on Face­book is extreme­ly dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, and users are effec­tive­ly faced with the sit­u­a­tion of watch­ing what the social plat­form offers up or watch­ing noth­ing at all.

Con­tent Distribution

Aside from the embed­ded approach which Face­book is attempt­ing, there also grounds for com­par­i­son with regard to con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion. This is some­thing that YouTube has worked very hard to devel­op, with most ana­lysts believ­ing that Face­book needs to rebrand and devel­op before it can be con­sid­ered a viable tele­vi­sion view­ing plat­form. Where Face­book does have an advan­tage over YouTube in this depart­ment is that it offers a tru­ly social plat­form, which is becom­ing increas­ing­ly impor­tant in all man­ner of dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences. If Face­book can cre­ate the same qual­i­ty of con­tent that YouTube deliv­ers then it could seri­ous­ly rival the dom­i­nant video platform.

YouTube is also deliv­er­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly more pre­mi­um con­tent than Face­book, but as the num­ber of peo­ple engag­ing with the social media plat­form clos­es on that of YouTube’s view­ing fig­ures this could con­ceiv­ably change. Ulti­mate­ly, the cre­ators of con­tent will decide this mar­ket­place, and if they per­ceive that Face­book pro­vides a supe­ri­or plat­form then this will be a sig­nif­i­cant blow for YouTube.

While Face­book is cur­rent­ly redou­bling its attempt to chal­lenge YouTube, oth­er sources are also attempt­ing to unseat the mar­ket-leader. Twit­ter, Snapchat and Meerkat/Periscope are all offer­ing unique video-based expe­ri­ences, and the future of the genre will very much depend on deliv­er­ing intel­li­gent, flex­i­ble seri­al­ized con­tent for cus­tomers which they can access on their own terms.

Cov­er Image © serge­ka — Fotolia