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It’s been touched on a time or two within this blog, but the race for your video uploads is now fully on, and Facebook is doing everything it can to catch YouTube. For years and years if you had a video to share, you would upload it straight to YouTube, and then you could share the link to whomever from there (many times to Facebook). Well, now Facebook wants you to cut out the middleman and upload all of your videos straight to your business page. According to a recent announcement, they’ve given business page owners many more options when it comes to uploading and sharing video.

So, how does this apply to you? Well, remember all those virtual tours you have? They’re often hosted on YouTube or on a third-party site, but if you have the video file itself, you really should use Facebook’s new video uploader. Before I tell you why, here’s a list of some features they’ve recently introduced:

  • Restrict the audience of a video by age and gender (in addition to location and language, which are already available).
  • Set an expiration date for a video and retain its insights, even after the video has been removed.
  • Publish video directly to the Videos tab for your Page, without distributing to News Feed or Timeline.
  • Allow or prohibit video embeds on third-party sites.
  • Add custom thumbnails for videos, using your own image or a suggested thumbnail.
  • Label videos based on interest categories, including Entertainment, News and more.

Facebook wants users to stay on Facebook as much as possible and not stray to sites like YouTube, where they can hang out for a long time. In this new race for video uploading dominance, it’s completely conceivable that, if you upload your video straight to Facebook, it could be favored (shown higher in News Feeds) than a video link from YouTube and that advantage could go a long way. If you upload a virtual tour straight to Facebook and a competing agent uploads a video to YouTube and then shares the link to Facebook, your video could theoretically be seen by many more people than your competition. That means more eyes on your video just by adjusting your online strategy very slightly.

I would highly suggest uploading all of your videos to Facebook and YouTube to make sure you’ve got all your bases covered, but in the future, Facebook may be all you need!