TJ Walker breaks down where to post video: Facebook favors short clips and live streams with quick engagement, but viewers stick around for only 10 seconds on average. YouTube keeps people watching for 10+ minutes and surfaces old videos for years, making it better for long-term reach and business leads. Use both, but adjust your content for each.
Questions this video answers
May 24, 2023.
About 10 seconds (average watch time on Facebook, as stated).
More than 10 minutes (average view duration, as stated).
Chapters
Should I put my videos on YouTube or Facebook or both? What are the differences between Facebook video and YouTube video? There are some differences. There's pros and cons to each. The beauty of Facebook is people can see that you know who they are. So they're much less likely to write nasty, vile things because you can see who it is, you can see who their friends are. So in my experience, people are much nicer, they're more polite on Facebook. That's nice. When you have something that is new and it's hot at the moment, you can get more attention. You can get it in front of your friends, your followers in a way that's often better than just a typical subscriber on YouTube. So that's a plus when it comes to Facebook. The other thing that's great about Facebook is they have a Facebook Live function and that gets in front of lot more of your friends, fans, followers, supporters as well. So there are many good things about Facebook. Now there's the bad side. The bad side is people only spend a few seconds in general watching a video on Facebook. I have videos that average one and a half, two and a half, three and a half, sometimes 10 minutes on YouTube and on Facebook, the average watch time, 10 seconds, doesn't mean you can never get something that's watched longer. But in general, it's just a little bitty snippet. People want to watch something to make them laugh or chuckle or get irritated. So it's a great place for something mildly amusing. But it's not necessarily the only place I would put something important. So keep that in mind. The other downside about Facebook video is after that day, pretty much no one goes back in to look for it. It's not easily searched, doesn't show up in search engines generally. That could change, of course, but in general, what you get that day when you post the video, that's all you'll ever get for that Facebook video. And in any one day, if you put a video on Facebook and on your YouTube channel, you might get a lot more views on on your Facebook page that day. But long term, you're likely to get a lot more on YouTube. Now, what are the advantages of YouTube? You can get people to watch more in depth. My most successful video on media training averages more than 10 minutes. People watching it, that's the average. So some people are watching the whole thing for an hour. I don't get anything like that Facebook. So that's the beauty of YouTube plus, it's just more searchable. I had a video I posted five years ago and recently a PR firm called me said, we love that particular media training video. We're going to hire you to be a spokesperson for an internal training video, and I get spin off business from it. That's the power of YouTube. Plus YouTube has more Google juice since Google owns it. So when you have things that work well on YouTube and you're promoting other things back to your website, there is greater search engine optimization value of your videos there. So there's pluses and minuses with each one. I think that for most people, most time it makes sense to do both. You may have a particular Facebook strategy where that's your home base. You may have a YouTube strategy for many businesses. Either put some or all of your videos on both.
