After investing time and money to produce your video commercial or content, so what’s next? Are you going to keep it and watch it by yourself again, and again?
This is akin to buying a nice car just to keep it in your car porch without driving out.
Producing a decent video for your brand is a good start, it is equally important to distribute the video too in order to reach your target audience and potential customers.
If you don’t have strong followers on your social media platforms, digital advertising is a must to promote your videos.
In most parts of the world, the biggest online platforms to distribute your videos are no doubt YouTube and Facebook (including Instagram).
The question is which platform should you prioritize?
Here we analyze the pros and cons of each platform so that you can evaluate and decide by yourself.
Number of Users
If we refer to the top social media platforms in Malaysia, there are 23M Facebook users, 20M YouTube users and 11M Instagram users respectively.
Do take note that the data above is recorded in 2018 and there are definitely more users on all the platforms now.
While Facebook has a slight edge here but it is not hard to see that YouTube will enjoy healthier growth moving forward. The young generations are using YouTube but Facebook? Nah.
🏆 Verdict: Facebook wins now, YouTube to win in the future
Target Audience
This is probably the only area Facebook has a significant advantage over YouTube.
If you intend to promote your video to a well-defined audience group (e.g. Female, age 30+, parents with pre-schoolers), Facebook is the obvious choice.
Facebook knows more about its users especially on demographics while Google / YouTube relies mainly on the user’s browsing, content consumption behaviour and history.
🏆 Verdict: Facebook wins
Content Lifespan
In most cases, the video objective can be categorized into either commercial (advertisement, promo, festive) or content (introduction, info, how-to).
While the commercial video is usually a short-term push, content-driven video can be evergreen hence longer lifespan.
Both platforms are suitable for short-term push, but YouTube is the best platform for evergreen content as the videos are easily searchable and discoverable compared to Facebook.
🏆 Verdict: YouTube wins
Cost per View (CPV)
The most important metric of a video campaign is the number of views gathered, therefore cost per view (CPV) is how you measure the return on ad spend of your video ad campaign.
From our past experience, CPV for both YouTube and Facebook can be as low as RM0.01, that’s one cent for one video view. The question here is, what is the definition of one video view?
Depending on the ad type and bidding method, Facebook starts charging once 3 seconds is watched, but you will only need to pay for the YouTube view when 30 seconds are watched.
🏆 Verdict: YouTube wins
Conclusion
For video commercials, best to go for both YouTube and Facebook if your budget permits. You can even include TikTok advertising as part of your plan if you intend to reach a younger audience.
If it is for evergreen content, YouTube should be your focus as the video views might continue to grow gradually over time, while Facebook videos will be buried forever after your campaign.
