As traditional media is becoming increasingly less effective in communicating and promoting your services and products, producing content/video to showcase your brand makes a lot of sense.

Social media will help you to deliver and amplify that message through video or any other type of content. So whether you are a hotel, restaurant or other type of business, video will definitely contribute to your success in a digital strategy.

Facebook and YouTube are the main players that distribute video content online and both have very unique and different characteristics.

YouTube is operated by Google and attracts the second-largest number of searches after Google Search, with three billion searches and more than 1.3 billion unique visitors each month.

This platform plays a major role in any digital marketing strategy over the long run. However, unlike Facebook, YouTube videos may not give you the instant gratification with the amount of views, as it is not as bulky.

But there is a reason for that. Facebook counts a view after three seconds after the video starts playing or even auto-playing.

Meanwhile, YouTube waits 30 seconds. But even if your YouTube video doesn’t have many views after a short period of time, there are several things you can do, such as making sure that you have the right descriptions in place with a good amount of keywords, tags and back links that point to your website.

If your video is optimised in this way, over time it will help your clients find your products and services when Video marketing is vital they are searching on YouTube.

On the other hand, Facebook, with an estimated 1.51 billion users and 665 million active users each day, offers a great way to distribute content and spread a message.

Facebook has been placing a lot of emphasis on video as a preferred medium with native video content, live steaming and 360 video. The aim is to have users upload the videos directly onto Facebook.

Once posted, your video is competing with all sorts of content, such as photos, links to articles and other posts.

Therefore your content needs to be short and to the point. In our experience, the shorter the video the better – we are talking about 15 to 45 seconds. Any longer and the retention of your viewers drops drastically.

The best thing about this platform is that you can deliver the content to a laser-targeted audience. And if you have paid ads, this will help put your content in front of potential buyers.

So which platform is better? I would say neither.

Each channel has different user behaviour, which can be relevant. Facebook will help you push content in a short period of time, where as YouTube will help out in the long run.

However, the most important thing is for your video to be entertaining and to deliver great value to your audience.

Daniel Villota is the Managing Director of E-Media Asia, the number one social media consulting agency in Southern Thailand. He can be contacted at daniel@e-media.asia or visit www.e-media.asia