Facebook Native Videos Outpace Competing Formats

User video content that’s uploaded directly to Facebook now accounts for a much larger share of the video posted, viewed and shared over the social media network, according to a March study released by San Francisco-based media analytics company Quintly.

Findings from Quintly’s Facebook Video Study suggests not only that more people and businesses are posting video content to Facebook than ever (which reinforces the urgency for brands to use video in their Facebook campaigns), but the fact that Facebook native videos are quickly becoming the default video format on the platform, a format to which social media marketers may wish to take note.

The study found that 90 percent of the Facebook profiles it analyzed featured Facebook native videos, which includes Facebook Live videos. By contrast, the percentage of Facebook profiles that posted YouTube videos accounted for only about a third of this (30 percent). Only two percent of timelines featured content from video-sharing website Vimeo. Other video formats accounted for an additional seven percent.

Quintly’s findings suggest that the percentage of Facebook users who post Facebook native videos is surging: a comparable Quintly study from last year revealed that only 65 percent of videos broadcast on Facebook were Facebook native videos.

Perhaps these findings shouldn’t be surprising, considering Facebook’s algorithm gives preference to native video when determining what content is shown in users’ news feeds.

When it comes to the interactions videos on the social media network receive, Facebook native videos were found to outperform other video formats. Facebook native videos performed 109.67 percent better than YouTube insofar as the total number of reactions, comments and shares a post these videos received. When it comes to shares alone, Facebook native videos yielded, on average, a 477.8 percent higher share rate than YouTube videos.