Should your video be on Facebook or YouTube?

Facebook and YouTube are two of biggest platforms you can use to share your organization’s videos online. (Read about some of the others here.)

But you’ll have different results with your videos depending on whether you upload them to Facebook or YouTube.

Your business plan should always drive your online marketing plan, not the other way around—so take a second to think about who you’re trying to reach and what you want to accomplish with your videos.

Who’s your target audience? Are they already connected with you? Will they be searching for industry terms or topics you’ll be covering in your videos?

Okay. Once you have that in mind, we can jump into what each platform brings to the table.

Why you should upload to Facebook

Videos uploaded directly to Facebook perform better than videos that were uploaded to YouTube and then shared to Facebook. In fact, native videos on Facebook currently see twice the reach of videos shared from third party websites, including twice as many likes, three times as many shares, and seven times as many comments.

Want the research on those stats? Find it here.

You’re also going to see more organic reach with videos on Facebook than with any other type of content, like an image or a text update.

So if engagement is one of your goals, then yes, you should definitely upload your videos to Facebook.

Why you should upload to YouTube

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: YouTube is the second-largest search engine. If your search engine rankings matter to you, you should be uploading your videos to YouTube. (Also, Google owns YouTube, and you simply have to play nice with Google to have good search engine rankings.)

YouTube includes the captions/subtitles of your videos in search results, so it’s a good idea to make sure those are accurate for any of your videos uploaded to that platform.

YouTube is where you’ll reach people who are specifically looking for videos about your industry or about a certain type of product, so you can reach people who have no prior connection to your organization at all.

Is it really a competition?

So should you upload to YouTube or to Facebook?

Yes.

We actually do both, and it might make sense for you to do that as well. We find that it’s an efficient way to use our video content to reach people who do (and people who don’t) know who we are. You get the best of both platforms that way.