The world’s largest social media marketing resource, Social Media Examiner® helps millions of businesses discover how to best use social media to connect with customers, drive traffic, generate awareness, and increase sales. They offer original and comprehensive articles, expert interviews, original research, and the news businesses need to improve their social media marketing.
They received a variety of feedback from their fan base - some were shocked and disappointed as they don’t view YouTube as a social platform. However, most applauded the move because they don't watch videos on Facebook. Instead, YouTube is their preferred place.
Founder Michael Stelzner likes to use this analogy “it’s kind of like putting a TV show on a highway and expecting people to watch it as they go zipping by. And Facebook is a highway"
The Results
They published the behind-the-scenes documentary called "The Journey" exclusively on YouTube. It's their ongoing story about how they market. Each show is about 7 minutes long and offers a peek into the real struggles and discoveries made by their marketing team.Their results showed that on YouTube, about 50% of the people who watch each episode actually make it to the end. That is exceptional compared to Facebook, which is almost always less than 1% for the exact same content.
The misleading part:
It "looks" like a lot more people are watching on Facebook because the view counts are deceptive. Facebook counts what's really a drive-by impression of 3 seconds as a view. On YouTube, a view is 30 seconds or more (although this has recently been changed to 10 seconds.)If you receive 5000 video views on Facebook and 1% make it to the end, that's 50 people. If you get 1000 views on YouTube and 50% make it to the end, that's 500. That's a 10x improvement and the Social Media Examiner team decided they would rather have 500 people make it to the end, not 50.
YouTube is where people prefer to watch videos that are longer than a few minutes. Here’s what a typical video’s retention looks like for Social Media Examiner on Facebook:
This pattern they witnessed over and over.
Despite the fact that Social Media Examiner has a significant fan base of 534,000 on Facebook and a small but growing one on YouTube (23,000), the data is clear. It's YouTube for the the long-form video content from now on for them.
