Category: Social Media

10th March 2016

Game of Thones : Facebook vs Youtube for video

Tuesday night niche parts of the internet went a little bonkers when the season 6 trailer of Game of Thrones was released, a week earlier than any fan anticipated.

HBO released the footage simultaneously on Facebook and Youtube. Both platforms quickly racked up millions of views, but I was really interested to see the what the difference was between the two and what that could mean for video sharing….(I promise there are no Season 6 spoilers in this post!)

Actually my thinking started last month when Ok Go – an American band, in part famous for their innovative music videos – released their latest video and chose to do so on Facebook only.

Hello, Dear Ones. Please enjoy our new video for “Upside Down & Inside Out”. A million thanks to S7 Airlines. #GravitysJustAHabit

Posted by OK Go on Thursday, 11 February 2016

If a band that is famous for its music videos chooses Facebook over a dedicated video sharing platform, what does that mean for online video sharing? Has facebook overtaken Youtube as a video distribution platform?

Game of Numbers

Lets have a look at the figures that are publicly available for the Game of Thrones trailer, which used both platforms for a comparison.

14 hours after the release of the trailer the Youtube upload had gained over 6 millions views:

But the footage shared on Facebook, well, that had over 19 million views:

So on the face of it, Facebook appeared to be performing over 300% better than Youtube.

But is it?

I suppose that depends on how each platform counts its views – how long does a video play for before it’s considered a view?

I’ve done some googling and Youtube, it seems, just don’t tell you what their time limit is – they don’t want people gaming the system, especially when you-tubers can earn income from advertising on their videos. This from Atlanta Analytics seems to be the most plain English explanation on HOW Youtube counts it’s views:

“YouTube video count WILL increment when:

You watch a video on youtube.com, as long as you don’t reload the video a bazillion times….You watch an embedded video (using YouTube’s own HTML5 or Flash player) on another domain that requires you to hit play.

YouTube will NOT increment video count when:

You watch an embedded video in a player that has autoplay enabled (video begins playing immediately on page load).You watch a video that is loaded through a proprietary player via the YouTube API.”

But Facebook’s own insights shows me that public view count is:

“…videos on your Page watched for 3 seconds or more.”

From what I can gather from my reading it counts everything on it’s site or embedded elsewhere with or without autoplay.

So if videos on Facebook auto-play while you are scrolling through your feed, and if you are pausing for just a few seconds to read friends updates above or below the post it registers as a view, How accurate an indication of view counts are these figures? Did the Game of Thrones trailer really rack up that many views?

A look at Facebook Insights

Now I don’t have access to Game of Thrones video insights, but I do have access to other pages we’ve shared videos to and I can take a closer look at the figures there.

This is a video we shared onto the Stirchley Baths facebook page

Ron Coley is in 60’s and has lived in Stirchley since a boy. in the 1970’s he used to use the baths once a week for his, well, weekly bath. Twas quirky….

Posted by Stirchley Baths on Thursday, 11 February 2016

On the public side of the site it says it has had 431 views, which for a page with 975 “likes” is just under half the audience, but when we look at the overview insights they tell a different story.

Of the 431 views, 348 were unique and on average only 28% watched to completion.

And when we really dig down and export the data to a CSV it tells another story again.

Lifetime Total Video Views 431
Lifetime Unique Video Views 348
Lifetime Total 30-Second Views 98
Lifetime Unique 30-Second Views 85
Lifetime Total Views to 95% 56
Lifetime Unique Views to 95% 54

So according to the insights of the 431 views, only 56 watched to almost completion, that’s 12% of the total number displayed by Facebook as a “view” And when we throw in another set of stats. Facebook’s Autoplay vs Click to Play figures then it tells you something else again:

Lifetime Total Video Views 431
Lifetime Auto-Played Video Views 402
Lifetime Clicked-to-Play Video Views 29
Lifetime Total 30-Second Views 98
Lifetime Auto-Played 30-Second Views 76
Lifetime Clicked-to-Play 30-Second Views 22
Lifetime Total Views to 95% 56
Lifetime Auto-Played views to 95% 40
Lifetime Clicked-to-Play views to 95% 16

The number of people who actively chose to click to watch the video was far far lower than those that watched it through auto play, but the retention rate of those that chose to watch to almost completion was much higher when someone had chosen to click on the link (10% on the AP compared to 52% CTP).

You can also break this down further in the insights if you want to, to people who watched with and without sound, but you don’t need to to see that Facebook’s Autoplay in news feed has a positive impact on viewer numbers on its platform, but nowhere near to the degree that the public facebook figures would have you believe.

The same video on Youtube had much lower viewing figures (30 overall from 26 unique users) but had a 74% view to completion rate. A true like for like comparison with Youtube is not possible as Youtube don’t give as detailed analytics as Facebook, but on the face of it people who watched via Youtube, watched for longer.

Maybe this is because they are on dedicated video sharing platform, or viewing an embed on a site where they’ve intentionally gone to find news on a project.

Who’s the winner?

So which is better for video sharing? I think it depends. Looking at the Game of Thrones trailer was a folly. It is a massively popular television series with an audience of millions and fan base that has eagerly awaits any tidbit of information and will watch, re watch and share any news they can get on any platform it’s on.

But for community use, for local news and for niche topics both is best. Youtube for it’s search and the ability to share , tag and target niche audiences and Facebook for the sheer numbers, the way it will appear and re appear in peoples timelines and for accessibility.

But which ever is best I think we can see that when looking at popular content we can’t take the viewing figures at face value and if you want to embed a video using Youtube, don’t have the autoplay enabled if you want the view to count.

I suppose I should also finish this with a disclaimer. I am a Game of Thrones fan and this all started with me blatantly getting my Game of Thrones fix while I impatiently wait for the the sixth season to start in April, or George RR Martin to (finally) finish next book installment of the series The Winds of Winter, but I had some useful musings from it.

24th February 2016

Facebook, Profiles, Pages and Groups. What’s the difference?

We were running an Awareness Session today for the East Birmingham Community Safety Partnership and it came up in conversation again about the different ways you can use Facebook – profiles, pages, open groups, closed groups – and how confusing it can be to the casual user.

There is a lot of choices and not always a plain English way of describing what each of them are – or why one might me better that the other, so I’m going to give it a go here.

Profiles

Profiles are people – end of. Profiles make friends with other profiles. Just like real life – you make friends with people – not places, businesses or brands. Friends can interact publicly and privately, and just like in “real life” this interaction can be initiated by either person.

Once you’ve made friends with someone, depending on your privacy settings, you will have mutual access to each others personal profile information, status updates and photos. – This is one of the reasons I refuse to make friends with brand or businesses who have profiles. I don’t know for sure WHO has access to it – or if I do know – who will have access to it in the future I don’t want strangers accessing photos of my son. Businesses should have pages.

But just like all rules there is an exception, mine is my hairdresser – I have a relationship with the person that cuts my hair and she is a business.

Pages

Pages are set up by people – and they represent groups, businesses charities, community groups etc. They are run by people. People with profiles can “like” pages – which essentially means they are interested enough to follow the updates on your page.

Unlike making friends. This is not a mutual connection – Profiles can view a pages information, photos, status etc but pages can not view profiles. Pages updates will go into their fans news feeds. Their fans updates do not appear in a pages news feed.

Pages can add other pages to their favourites and receive updates from other pages – but again this is not a mutual connection.

Pages can receive private messages, and they can respond to private messages, but they cannot start a private conversation with anyone – contact with a page needs to be initiated by a person (profile).

When a page owner posts to their wall the content appears as the page in date order with the latest post at the top and this is pushed out to fans news feed. All page owners content is given priority over all content created by fans – all posts to the page by anyone other than the admin stays on the page in a section called “Visitors Posts” – and is not pushed out to other fans news feeds unless the page owner share it.

I know some people get iffy about running pages with their personal account but in my honest opinion they shouldn’t, for starters there is no link to you from the page unless you choose to put it there. and secondly running a page form your personal account makes life so much easier

I manage several facebook pages from my personal profile and unless you know me, and I choose to tell you, you’ll never know which ones. Unlike groups where you always post as yourself – the default is to post as the page, so there’s little chance for mispost mishaps.

Groups

People with profiles can create and join groups – Groups can be for anything – they are a way of bringing people together with shared interests. There are several types of groups and I like to use a pub analogy to try and explain them:

Public A public group is like a pub on a high street with it’s windows and doors wide open. Any one can wander by and hear the conversation, Anyone can enter or be invited in to join in and you can come and go as you please.
Closed A closed group is like standing outside a pub with locked windows and doors – you can see who’s inside but you can’t hear what they are talking about, you can’t join in and you have no idea if its the sort of place you’d want to go – you just have to knock until you are invited in and then decide….If you leave, you have to ask to be given access again.
Secret A secret group is like a private party in a pub you don’t even know exists until someone invites you along.

Whenever something is added to a group it appears at the top of the group feed, if someone comments on something older this is then bumped back to the top so the order of posts is constantly changing giving prominence to the most recent thing posted or commented on. Unless something is “pinned” by an admin to stick to the top for awhile – anyone’s posts could be pinned.

Unlike pages, when a group admin posts to a group that content is adding as themselves.

All posts to groups don’t automatically appear in you news feed the way you receive group notifications can be set per group and deserves a blog post all of it’s own!

So that’s it, my plain English attempt at explaining the different ways to use facebook.

19th June 2014

5 stars of open local democracy?

There’s a conversation going on in South Birmingham – led by Karen Cheney and Austin Rodriguez and others – about how to get more public democratic processes shared more widely. This builds on various work (including a Cllr in Billesley buying some kit to live stream for the first time their ward ctte meeting). At a meeting yesterday we talked a bit about equipment and platforms, but also that not all meetings need to be live streamed etc. So, I wondered, could establish stages of activity for digital open local democracy? I said I write up my thoughts as a blog post….

What are the principles?

In the mould of Tim Berners-Lee, I’m adapting his 5 stars of open data. ~~I’m know I won’t be the first person to think through these stages, – I’ve searched but not found the 5 stars thing for very local public meetings. If you find it then please share.~~ Update: this is where I’ve seen something similar before: http://www.comms2point0.co.uk/comms2point0/2014/6/3/proposals-to-improve-health-and-wellbeing-board-social-media.html/

This is a summation of some of our experience social reporting over the years and the following list applies to local processes, currently things like police priority setting meetings, patient forums for GP and CCG’s, council ward committee’s, housing association walkabouts, neighbourhood forum meetings or neighbourhood watch groups. This is the myriad of daily democracy that we have created over time.

5 stars of open (hyper)local democracy

1 star: Be seen and be welcoming. Put agenda’s and minutes somewhere where it is very easy to find them and where it is easy for others to share them. Make sure everyone knows they’re invited. (This could be a blog, just on google docs with a link or creating an Eventbrite to invite people to meetings. It can include putting invites through doors and agenda’s and minutes on public noticeboards.)

2 star: Talk about what you’re doing. This means that you have a #hashtag for your meeting and publicise it and also share what you know (make sure that background information to papers is publicly available). You are open to others live reporting or recording what you are doing.

3 star: Do it live. You do the above but you also do it during your meeting or event. This is where you can introduce a livestream of video or audio or live social reporting through twitter, facebook and or a blog. This also means you only hold meetings in places where there is good, publicly usable wi-fi or 3g.

4 star: Involve people outside the room in the meeting. This is a step change from being seen to be doing. This values the questions and comments made on the web as being as important to your meeting as the ones made in the room. They are incorporated though hashtags or services like cover it live, blyve or a facebook q&a as the event unfolds. This could also mean organising events specifically for talking to people on the web.

5 star: It’s a permanent conversation. This fifth step recognises that the civic conversation you’re having doesn’t just happen at times and places you decide. It can happen all the time. It means being responsive in between meetings when, for example a comment appears on a website or a hashtag.

There are other stages I could have added – using open data for example, but I’m trying to envisage stages by which we can help us develop from the familiar “meeting with 1 man and a dog in a draughty village hall”. So perhaps the 5 stars of “more” open local democracy.

Behind all this is another core principle:

Keep it simple:

Collaborate. Don’t do this in silos, have things that involve many services, voluntary or statutory.
Use available tools. make things happen with the mobile phones around you, using livestreaming through google hangout or similar, rather than needing to build a thing. (there are very fine services used for some formal democratic processes, but they’re not essential here)
Use available kit – what can you achieve with a smart phone or two? How much do you really need to buy, is video right for your sort of event?
Go to where people are If the busiest place to find people is on facebook can you use that for your online conversations. Sharing live events online through hyperlocal blogs is another example

If you can’t make it work without these then clearly start looking for other ways of doing but start with keep it simple, not with “we need to build a portal for that” .

Thanks also to our very own Steph Clarke for helping me think through this – she’s oodles of experience of encouraging public services to get involved with people online both at work and her volunteer efforts at www.wv11.co.uk

2nd May 2014

Facebook Reach – How to reach your non for profit / hyperlocal audience for free

Something has been really frustrating me recently about Facebook – and it’s been covered lots of other blogs – the reach that pages are getting with their posts has seemingly plummeted since Facebook has moved towards a model of trying to get you to “boost” your content – or rather, pay to get a wider audience to see it. But when you’re a not for profit, or a community website paying to promote content just isn’t an option….and as we’ve posted before it may not actually be the best option.

Insights and more importantly reach – specifically how to reach more people is something we get asked about a fair bit at Social Media Surgeries and when I got asked about it again this week I decided to do some digging to try and work out 1. What on is going on with reach and 2. Can we improve page reach without paying?

The other day I posted a story about young girl Freya Powers, to the WV11 website and facebook page – Freya has not long been diagnosed with non-hodgkins lymphoma and her parents are fundraising for the cancer ward she is being treated on. We basically put a call out asking for help with the fundraising. It was a popular post which is why I’ve chosen this one to look at.

This is what the reach looks like on the front page of Facebook:

22 people liked this content, 38 people shared it and 4,168 people reached – just under 60% of our pages followers

BUT 38 people have shared this and our reach is less that our total page likes? I know from past experience that when you see shares like that the reach is normally way way over the total numbers of likes on a our page, so I looked deeper.

Here is the expanded insights for that post:

It’s still showing a reach of 4,168 put but it’s now showing 42 likes – 22 on our page – and a further 20 on shares…. And then I realised something – on previous versions of Facebook insights you could view a separate figure for viral reach and this wasn’t showing, so I went searching. I download the full insights file….

They say this:

Lifetime The number of people who saw your Page post in News Feed or ticker, or on your Page’s Timeline. (Unique Users) 4186
Lifetime The number of impressions of your post in News Feed or ticker or on your Page’s Wall. (Total count) 12033

But then the figures from “followers” only say this:

Lifetime The number of people who saw your Page post because they’ve liked your Page (Unique Users) 2018
Lifetime The number of impressions of your Page post to people who have liked your page. (Total count) 4731

So it appears facebook have started to combine pages organic reach with it’s viral reach in its overview and when looked at like that it’s worse than I thought.

Facebook have delivered our content to 32% of the people who liked our page – the rest of the figures have come from people sharing the post which is a huge drop in reach to what we were seeing just 12 months ago.

Reach in decline

Edgerank Checker have done a much wider piece of research into this and they’ve noted a year on year decline too

For the typical Page on Facebook in March 2014:

Organic Reach per Fan = 6.51%

Fan Reach per Fan = 6.46%

Viral Reach per Fan = 0.99%

Where were we before this?

Organic Reach per Fan (Median):

Feb 2012 = 16%
Sep 2013 = 12.60%
Nov 2013 = 10.15%
Dec 2013 = 7.83%
Mar 2014 = 6.51%”

Filtering

I Googled to see if I could find an answer for this steep decline and the best explanation I could find was on this Tech Crunch article – The filtered feed problem – Why Is Facebook Page Reach Decreasing? More Competition And Limited Attention

It is well worth a read but essentially it says – while we add more people and more things to our facebook feed by making friends and liking “stuff” – the amount of time we spend looking at the feed stays the same so facebook are working to try and make that time relevant – which means filtering irrelevant content.

Which means followers won’t always see the stuff we want them to see.

It also has a really interesting simplification on the algorithm facebook uses to filter posts.

BUT importantly it also states that all pages are not treated equally

Facebook is penalising pages for link bait tactics and spammy posts. Post memes or banal “share this if you love your mom” or “1 like = 1 respect” text and image based content or over share repetitive content you are going to see a sharp reduction in the amount of places your content is seen.

So how do we stay on the right side of facebook’s filtering and increase your reach without paying to boost your content?

Based on the post from Wv11 I shared above we have an average post to followers reach of 32% – which by looking at all the sites I’ve read through today puts us at the higher end of the scale for organic (non paid for) reach .

Why do I think that is? Well, I think on whole it’s by following these set of tips

Be useful and relevant – is the content something your page followers would want to see – is it the type of posts they are used to seeing? Write about the things you know about and your audience will care about.
Accessible content – Think mobile as well as desktop. Lots of people use their mobile to browse the internet and specifically Facebook , is your content mobile friendly –When we post links to stories try and summarise that content for mobile only readers – some people still wont or cant click on on external links from the page, especially those with contracts or PAYG mobiles that include free facebook browsing but not a lot of other data.
Photos, photos and more photos. Anything we post with an image is guaranteed to the get more love than either text or video. It takes the lowest amount of effort from the reader to take in the information so they engage with it, which improves your reach. You can also invite readers to tag themselves and friends in photos from events. Videos are also popular but get less views from mobile than desktop. I think this maybe down to the data usage again
Timing. Facebook insights are a wonderful thing. They are broken down to such an extent that we can even know when our followers are online – We get a graph that averages hourly visitor numbers over days – but we can also see data for each day of the week which allows us to post when potentially the most people are online to reach the widest audience possible.
Don’t post repetitive content – if we want to re-share something – we reword it or post content with a different photograph so that facebook can see your making an effort to share something new.
Don’t spam.

I don’t deny it’s frustrating to have put the effort in to build and audience of over 6000 to only reach a third of them. But in the short term a third of 6000 is still 2000 more people to connect with than if Facebook didn’t exist and in the long term hopefully as Facebook filtering gets better and spammy pages are penalized by following these rules the relevant, informative pages will see their reach stabilise, or increase.