Are you thinking about advertising with video on Facebook?
Let’s just get this out of the way up front: Facebook is now a leading video platform and the only major YouTube competitor. Up 200 percent from 2015, Facebook serves 8 billion views per day and people watch 100 million hours of video per day.
People love watching videos. Considering that 1.18 billion people use Facebook daily, this creates an unprecedented opportunity for marketers to get their video content in front of potential customers.
Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg laid out his ‘video first’ strategy. “We see a world that is video first, with video at the heart of all of our apps and services,” says Zuckerberg. Facebook, which recently outperformed analysts’ expectations by 55% in a single quarter, is on track to generate 22 billion dollars, largely due to mobile ad revenue in 2016.
So why are advertisers going gaga for Facebook video advertising?
1. World-Class Targeting
Facebook knows more about its users than any other advertising platform on earth. Everything a user has ever liked, clicked, watched, or interacted with is utilized to create an incredibly detailed personal profile.
For example, Facebook knows your U.S. political affiliation. Don’t believe me? Go to Privacy Shortcuts > More Settings > Ads > Ads Settings > Manage preferences > Visit Ad Preferences > Top Interests, go to “More” > Lifestyle and Culture > Scroll down to US Politics. Did Facebook peg you correctly? Browse through the other audiences Facebook has placed you in. What do you think? Pretty accurate?
As an advertiser, you can take advantage of this incredibly detailed and accurate Facebook targeting to serve your video content to the exact right audience. Target only your relevant potential customers and don’t pay money unless they watch your advertisement.
2. Facebook is a Discovery Platform
Everyone knows that you go to YouTube to search for a video. Makes sense. YouTube is a search-based platform, meaning people type in what they’re looking for. Search implies intent, like you actually know what you’re looking for (or at least have a general idea).
Facebook, however, is a discovery-based platform. People are in a different frame of mind when they use Facebook. In most cases, people aren’t looking for anything in particular, so they are potentially more receptive to your video. If your video is relevant to the target audience (and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be!) there is an even greater likelihood it will get viewed.
3. Video Delivery
Targeted video is great when trying to reach all those potential customers who aren’t yet aware of your brand. According to video statistics released by Adobe, “shoppers who view video are 1.81 times more likely to purchase than non-viewers.” Video is eye-catching, memorable, and an easy way for non-customers to get introduced to your product.
No need to bring traffic to your website to watch your product video; instead, show potential customers your video directly in their Facebook news feed. For example, here at TechSmith, we have completely changed how we serve up tutorial content.
Prior to Facebook video advertising, here at TechSmith we hosted all tutorial content solely on our website and YouTube. You needed to either seek it out on our site or search for it on YouTube. Now, we serve helpful tutorials directly into target customers’ Facebook newsfeeds. In the course of one month, we’ve served over 66k tutorials to 10k unique individuals on Facebook. Many of those viewers are folks who would never seek out a product tutorial on their own, but they end up watching because it’s convenient and they then want to learn more.
Your Turn
Have you marketed any of your videos on Facebook? What was the experience like for you? Interested in trying it out? What are your hesitations? Please sound off in the comments below and let us know!