Attaching visual content to your posts on Facebook will greatly maximize the amount of viewers who’ll see it. Video is a great medium for expressing ideas and connecting to your audience online, and luckily it is very easy to do!
There are two main ways to get video on Facebook – uploading it through Facebook’s official video application and sharing your video through sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. Each way has it’s own downsides and upsides, and there are times when one is more appropriate than the other.
Facebook Video
- On paper, using Facebook video is relatively easy – hit post, upload or record your video and voila! In real life, however, it isn’t always that easy. Recording Facebook Video is notoriously buggy (oftentimes at the end of the recording your video will show an error, forcing you to re-record) and the quality of the video and audio is noticeably compressed. This method is also not a great option because you won’t have an opportunity to edit or refine your video once it goes up.
- You can also upload a video that you’ve already created on Facebook. However, for a variety of reasons, it is occasionally difficult to get Facebook Video to play nice with a wide range of browsers and devices.
Sharing YouTube and Vimeo to Facebook
- Sharing gives users a wider range of flexibility than uploading to Facebook. Vimeo and YouTube are applications that work almost universally – other websites can embed them, they boost your SEO rankings and they work across a wide variety of browsers and devices. Sharing a video to YouTube also makes it easier for people to share your content outside of Facebook, to Tumblr, Twitter and other social sites.
- Another benefit to sharing your video to Facebook is that you can edit it with several filters and trim it for length. If you choose to record a video with your webcam to YouTube, you’ll be able to create a more polished looking video.
Making it easy for your audience to access your video is the best way to get your message across. Which method have you found the most success with?
