Dive Brief:
- Marketers face a challenge with video on Facebook as 95% of views take place in the first week.
- The issue arises from Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, which is geared toward fresh content, meaning existing content tends to quickly fall off user’s feeds.
- In terms of building a searchable video library, YouTube outpaces the largest social network, offering a better user experience.
Dive Insight:
Video analytics platform Visible Measures found that video uploaded to Facebook accounts for 95% of views in the first week. Visible Measures reasons that Facebook isn’t seen as place to search for content and instead users see their News Feeds as being designed to promote fresh content.
Brian Shin, founder and CEO of Visible Measures, told Digiday, “There was a time on Facebook when there was no news feed. In order for you to really get updates on what people were doing, you had to go to their page. What the news feed did was it aggregated all of that and made it easy for people to keep on top of things.”
Shin added, “The search box is pretty much the first thing you see on Facebook on mobile and desktop. But people only do Facebook searching by name; being able to search by keyword or topic, that could solve the conundrum for marketers who want their entire portfolio [of videos] to be watched.”
Facebook has been active in making changes to ads on the platform, including a new option that allows marketers to only pay for ads that reach 100% in view, although there is no minimum time for that viewability standard.