videos you post on Facebook

The views that videos posted to Facebook appear to be high, but are people actually watching the video?

Or is Facebook artificially boost the view count?

The answer is simple: Facebook inflates the view count by counting views when no one is actually watching your video. This article will cover the exact method that Facebook uses to inflate views, what you can do to see how many people actually view your video, and whether it is worth it to post videos to Facebook.

The Facebook video product is responsible for all aspects of the Facebook Video views, Including developing and executing video advertising campaigns and executing marketing campaigns.

Key Featured:

  1. Identify and prioritize the key challenges facing Facebook video in revenue, growth, engagement, user retention, and consumer trends.
  2. Work with the business to identify business opportunities that can be monetized through Facebook video advertising campaigns.
  3. Develop creative strategies for monetizing videos on the platform through a combination of native ads, video ads, sponsored content, or other strategies
  4. Build a product roadmap of product that includes key features that will be addressed throughout the product lifecycle
  5. Plan FB video ads to support ad quality goals – Ad quality is defined as delivering high-quality videos with low latency to achieve desired results.

How does Facebook inflate video views?

Facebook has a few different methods that they use to inflate video views. 

The most common way they do this is by counting it as a view when someone only watches under a few seconds of your video. 

We know Facebook does this because they provide different metrics to measure views. The two we will focus on are “10-second” views and the normal views metric.

10-second views are only counted when someone has watched ten seconds or more of your video. These views are not publicly displayed, but you can see them on the private metrics for the video. 

Unfortunately, the ten-second views are always lower than the view count that is publicly displayed. This means that Facebook counts views when people have viewed less than ten seconds of the video. They have not publicly stated the time that they count, but it has been hypothesized that it could be as low as 3 seconds. This is why people try to find where to get Facebook views to give themselves Social Proof.

Obviously, this is not a particularly useful metric. If that is the case, then that means that Facebook video views are practically the same as the news feed impressions. This is because videos uploaded to Facebook will automatically play when a user scrolls past them on the news feed.

Another downside of the metrics is that they include users that use sound and those that do not use sound. If you want to find a metric that includes users that use sound, then you have to rely on a percentage breakdown of your viewers that used sound. 

This works, but it is not very efficient for determining viewers. The more shocking part is the small number of viewers that use sound. Some case studies have shown that only 30% of viewers even use sound.

The small amount of viewers using sound does not mean that they like to watch videos without sound. It means that Facebook counts the automatically played video (done without sound) as a view, which is a useless view. 

People need sound to watch most videos on the Internet. 

This obvious view inflation by Facebook is just an attempt to increase the number of views that you get on Facebook. Unfortunately, these views are mostly useless views meant to pad the numbers and make Facebook’s video platform look more popular. 

Should I use Facebook video?

Yes. Facebook video still has a use, but do not be misled by the large number of views that your videos will receive. Those views are mostly meaningless. You can see just how bad the view inflation by looking at the amount of engagement your video receives compared to the number of views it receives. 

The engagement will always be much lower than you expect.

Anyway, a Facebook video is best used with short videos. You should not really post a video to Facebook that is over two or three minutes, but even that is long. Many of the most successful Facebook videos are under a minute. 

Now, short videos do well because people can watch them quickly. Plus, people are much more likely to share a short video than a long video. 

Just posting a short video is not good enough though. The absolute best Facebook videos are short videos that draw a massive emotional response from people. Usually, people like to watch and share videos that make them laugh or say “aww” (cute animal videos). 

All in all, you can still post videos to Facebook to help promote your business. Save the informative and long videos for YouTube, which is a much better platform for that. Focus on the short and funny videos for Facebook because they will get much more shares.

What about Facebook Live?

Facebook Live is still a decent option for videos. The metrics work the same for live video as they do for normal video. This means that sound on and sound off are both recorded as views. 

The main advantage of Facebook Live is that people are much more willing to watch a live video on Facebook as opposed to another platform like YouTube. 

Plus, Facebook Live gives you more ways to track metrics and interact with your fans compared to the other available options. For example, the chat features on YouTube are lacking compared to Facebook.

Back to the point, you can easily track your viewers with Facebook Live, so in this case, we recommend using Facebook Live if you want to do live streams.

Final Verdict

Overall, Facebook overinflates video viewership, which makes the platform a little difficult to gauge. 

This means you should not even consider views when evaluating the success of a Facebook video. Instead, you should focus on the amount of engagement that the video receives. 

The best engagement to track is shares because this is what really allows your video to be seen by more people.

Anyway, do not let this article scare you off from ever posting a video to Facebook. You should just adjust your strategy when posting videos to Facebook.

Do not bother posting your long videos to Facebook. You will not get anyone to watch them. 

Focus on super short videos that get to the point quickly. The best videos are those that people can easily share with their friends. Some of these videos even include a question or other call to action at the end of the video.

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