Watching videos online has been an indispensable part of most people's daily lives. 78% of people watch videos online every week, and the number of people who watch online videos every day is as high as 55%. As a result, videos have become essential marketing content. According to the study, 54% of consumers prefer to browse videos to get to know the new brands or products; if the word "video" is included in the title of the email, the opening rate is significantly increased by 19%.  The facts have proved that the videos can attract a large number of viewers' attention and call people to take action. Take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge as an example. The challenge resulted in 2.4 million tags for the challenge videos on Facebook by the viral marketing, and the campaign successfully raised more than 40 million US dollars for ALS patients.

Many marketing staffs know the powerful marketing capabilities of the videos. Still, there is a problem in their mind: which platform should they upload the content to achieve the best promotion result? In this article, we will compare the features of Facebook and YouTube, which are the most popular social media platforms today. And we hope this article will be helpful to you.

The Features of Facebook

Facebook users have reached 2.5 billion in 2019. That means about one of the three people in the world has a Facebook account. Now Facebook is the most popular social media in the world. Through the "sharing" function on Facebook, live streaming a video can quickly spread on Facebook to reach the largest audience. Moreover, there are many different themes of communities on Facebook. For Facebook users, joining the communities is an excellent way to get valuable and exciting information from their friends. For the marketing managers, managing a community means gathering abound of people who have the same interests. The community can be a platform for brand marketing.

However, Facebook is not perfect. The weakness of Facebook is that there is no indexing mechanism, which makes the accessibility of Facebook's content is limited to the platform. It is almost impossible to search the posts on Facebook through Google, Yahoo, or Bing search engines. Therefore, the Facebook platform does not support search engine optimization ( SEO). Besides, Facebook presents the latest updated posts to the users, and the accessibility of the older posts is very, very low. 

Thus, the content on Facebook cannot increase its' credibility by viewing traffic. Generally, your post on Facebook is only limited to your friends. If you want to have more people to engage with your post, you must expand a vast social network to engage large audiences.

The Features of YouTube

YouTube is the first professional platform in the world for watching online videos. Users can upload, watch, share videos and leave comments on YouTube. As the content creators continue to grow, more and more diverse contents attract viewers to stick on YouTube. Now, more than one billion people use YouTube worldwide. A tremendous amount of video content has been stored on YouTube – 400 hours of video content has been uploaded to YouTube every hour; people spend one billion hours watching YouTube per day. 

YouTube is now the second largest search engine, just after its' parent company, Google. Users can access videos by keyword searching on YouTube. The mechanism allows high-quality content on YouTube to accumulate credibility from the viewing traffic.  Users can still easily find valuable content by keyword searching even if the post is long ago. YouTube has the advantage of SEO which Facebook doesn't have.

The success of YouTube has more and more people watching videos on YouTube rather than on TV. The trend forces traditional TV stations to upload content and live stream videos on YouTube to get more traffic, which is highly related to their advertisement income. The innovation of YouTube changes the circumstances of the media industry, and it also results in the new type of key opinion leaders such as "YouTubers" and "Internet Celebrities."

1+1 Could Be Greater than Two  Datavideo Dual Platforms Live Streaming Solution

Live streaming video has become one of the essential marketing content today. Before launching the video marketing campaign, the marketing managers must identify their target audience (TA) and the key performance indicators (KPIs) because the different platforms have different features. For instance, Facebook can reach a large audience and has a high engagement rate with the audience. However, people spend less than 30 seconds watching a video on Facebook, while the average viewing time per video is over ten minutes on YouTube. This fact proves that YouTube is a powerful platform for watching videos.  

As an intelligent media producer, it is critical to make good use of the advantages of each platform. Additionally, it is also helpful to live stream your video content to multiple platforms as much as possible. It is crucial to make your live video engage more audience and make them willing to spend more time on your video. 

With the help of social media networks, it is easier for marketing managers to deliver the marketing content to different groups of TA.  Moreover, multi-brand and cross-platform marketing campaigns have become the new approach for marketing nowadays. For example, more and more live production teams live stream videos to both Facebook and YouTube simultaneously so that their content can reach different communities simultaneously. It will be constructive if more people can view the video.

Datavideo realizes the trend of this media operation. So, we have introduced several live streaming encoders which support the function of "dual platforms" live streaming. The models supporting dual streaming function include NVS-34 H.264 Dual Streaming Encoder, the innovative KMU-200, and the new HS -1600T MARK II HDBaseT Portable Video Streaming Studio version . In the future, there will be more dual streaming devices available from Datavideo. 

Except for Facebook and YouTube, more platforms support live streaming, such as Wowza. If the user wants to live stream events to multiple platforms, the dvCloud, the live streaming cloud service from Datavideo, is an ideal point-to-point live streaming solution. dvCloud allows users to live stream videos to multiple content distribution networks (CDNs) without time limitation. The dvCloud Professional includes unlimited hours of streaming, up to five simultaneous live sources, stream up to 25 platforms simultaneously, and 50GB of cloud recording storage. For more information on dvCloud, visit www.dvcloud.tv.