As you know, Facebook video is booming, as is marketers’ interest in it. The company revealed earlier this year that the number of video posts per person increased 75% globally and 94% in the US over the course of one year. Globally, the amount of video from people and brands in News Feed grew 3.6x year-over-year. And that was as of three months ago. A much bigger deal has been made of Facebook video in that time.
Mixpo conducted a survey among 125 agencies, brands, and publishers to get a feel for their existing video marketing habits and their plans for the future.
“In August of last year, comScore found that for the first time Facebook had more video views than YouTube on desktop,” the report says. “Since that time, the two have been battling it out month by month for the top spot. Facebook’s meteoric rise is driven by their growth in video views per person, which have nearly doubled year-over-year from January 2014 compared to January 2015. With Facebook’s reported video views exceeding three billion per day in January of 2015, a figure that had tripled since September of 2014, that means comScore’s desktop numbers only represent one tenth of Facebook’s total video views.”
Advertisers and agencies plan to run video campaigns more across the board, including on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Vine, Google+, Snapchat, and even Pinterest (in that order), according to the report. Last year, when Mixpo conducted a similar survey, more respondents (77.8%) said they planned to run YouTube videos compared to 63% for Facebook. This year, however, it’s 87% for Facebook compared to 81.5% for YouTube.
This doesn’t come as much of a surprise. SocialBakers recently shared data showing that brands are already sharing native Facebook videos on Facebook more than YouTube videos, which was pretty much unheard of a year prior.
Mixpo notes that there is also substantial interest in Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
One interesting finding from the report is that even though Facebook is a social network/marketing platform, and video advertising plans are all over various social platforms, 83% of companies don’t consider their social team the primary strategy driver for ads run in social.
“Several years ago, social campaigns were all about generating earned media through viral content,” says the report. “These campaigns were primarily managed by people with the word “social” in their title. Only recently have the paid media offerings of the social networks truly matured, which their advertising revenue growth reflects. In 2014, social advertising spending grew 40% to $8.5 billion3. Accordingly, 60% of social campaigns; which are now mostly paid; are falling under the purview of digital media teams rather than social teams. In fact, social teams only drove the primary planning for social campaigns for 17% of the respondents.”
Also interesting are the metrics advertisers are placing the most value on. Views and completion rates are both absent from the top three.
The free report also walks you through some case studies for Facebook video.
Images via SocialBakers, Mixpo