Brands Shifting Away from YouTube Towards Native Video

Have you noticed more autoplay videos in your Facebook News Feed lately? In the last several months, it seems that native video is becoming a popular way for publishers and brands to share video content and receive great feedback and engagement from users.

Video, as many of us know, is the hero of the online marketing world at the moment – according to Re/Code, it accounts for 78% of all web traffic and the number is expected to grow.

Recent data from Socialbakers shows that brands will be sharing more native video content than content hosted on YouTube: 

Video vs Native Video

Compared to the overall video trend, native video is expected to grow at an even faster rate. Native video is video content that is “native” to the social networking site i.e. content that is uploaded or created on the social network. Instead of sharing a link of video that is uploaded to YouTube, for example, the video is played in-feed.

SocialTimes reports that native video is expected to be one of the more dominant elements of major social networks within the next few years. Facebook has already begun to capitalize on this by introducing video ads last year. Twitter is following in those footsteps by rolling out its native video ads. Here’s how they work:

Users can shoot and edit video directly from the Twitter app. Videos can be created as short as one second or rearrange to create a video up to 30 seconds long. Users can also upload their own video up to 30 seconds from their camera roll; advertisers may up load video up to 10 minutes long. Twitter first announced the new tools back in January 2015.

Since that time, brands and publishers have seen staggering video views on both Facebook and Twitter and at a cost effective measure of as low as two cents per view. For brands that are looking for ways to connect with their audience, native videos are getting better organic reach than regular posts or even videos that are hosted elsewhere.

What Does the Shift Towards Native Ads Mean?

For popular networks such as Facebook and Twitter, the shift means that brands will have to compete for users’ attention. Since more brands will be publishing videos, brands will need to make sure they are producing quality video that catches the audience’s attention. Native video will likely increase user engagement and time spent on these social networks making it more worthwhile for brands to publish videos directly on these sites rather than using a site such as YouTube as a central video hub for video content.

Sharing and creating video content is here to stay; the approach, however, for brands will likely shift to producing more engaging, quality video that is shared more directly to target audiences.