The Social Video World Is Changing

Until recently, YouTube had the market cornered on video both by users and brands. If you wanted the greatest interaction with your fans, that's where you'd go.

That's all changed recently since Facebook has put such a huge emphasis on video. As a result, a number of surprising facts about social video have come into play thanks to data from Socialbakers. Here's what they found.

• The top 1,000 profiles on both YouTube and Facebook are uploading 4X the number of videos on Facebook now. Many big brands have even stopped posting on YouTube altogether in favor of Facebook. That said, there are still brands and large media publishers that still enjoy big gains from posting on YouTube.

• In terms of interactions, Facebook videos perform much better than other platforms. Organic fan reach is 3X higher than YouTube. They're also shared a lot more. 

• Instagram is still mostly a picture platform, but it's being used more and more by brands for short videos. The problem is that most people still don't relate to videos on the platform, and would prefer to get their videos from elsewhere.

• YouTube videos are still the most commonly shared on Twitter.

The takeaway is that YouTube is losing market share to other platforms, and what that means is you should also consider other platforms besides YouTube for your videos. Don't abandon YouTube though, because it's still a powerhouse.

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Now More People See Your Facebook Video Posts

Just as soon as we thought we had Facebook promotion figured out, they went and changed its algorithm again.

For a few years now it was common practice to always include a photo with every post and minimize the number of video posts in order to get the highest engagement. Now research company Socialbakers has found that Facebook video is now the way to go.

In the study of over 4,000 brand pages and 670,000 posts over the last 6 months, the company found that the lowest organic search reach came from a post with a photo. What's more, it averaged out that only about 4 in 100 followers actually see it, which is way down from the already diminished 16 of just a few years ago.

Videos, on the other hand, have an organic reach of 8.7%, or almost 9 people out of 100.

Links and text-only posts now have a 5.3% and 5.8% reach. Once again, this means that around 5 or 6 out of every hundred of your followers will see it.

The reason for the change is that Facebook is trying to evolve into a video platform to rival Youtube, so videos now get priority. The trick is to upload them directly to Facebook though, rather than just embedding them from Youtube.

One of several downsides is the fact that many are already hip to what's happening, so more and more artists are promoting their video posts, which means that there'll be more competition for the 1.3 billion eyeballs that are there.

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Shakira Passes 100 Million Facebook Likes

When it comes to Twitter and Facebook, music celebrities rule. There's been a running battle between Katy Perry, Britney Spears and Rihanna in the last couple of years as to who was the most popular, but it looks like Shakira has bested them all, at least on Facebook.

Last week it was announced that Shakira broke the 100 million Like barrier, making her the undeniable queen of Facebook. This represents 8% of the Facebook universe of 1.28 active world-wide users.

It appears that her sudden jump in popularity came as a result of her appearance at last month's World Cup. It was only 5 years ago that the singer sported only 318,000 Likes, but now she has the first celebrity Facebook page ever to break the 9 figure barrier.

While people in the States think that the social world revolves around them, the social media metrics company Socialbakers estimates that only 11% of Shakira's followers come from the US, as compared to 17% for Rihanna and 25% for Eminem.

It's already been estimated that somewhere between 5 and 15% of those Likes are fakes or spam, as high-traffic celebrity sites are prime territory for spammers and scammers to do their work. That said, that's still an enormous number of endorsements for anything and anybody, and shows the power of social media when the situation is right.

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