How to Post Video to Facebook and Five Reasons Why You Should

By Stewart Gandolf, Chief Executive Officer

Facebook, like many social media tools, is most effective when the visitor is engaged by the content. The idea seems tame enough on the surface, but it disguises the reality that visitors often don’t notice (and likely don’t care much) that you’re trying to talk to them.

Marketing-savvy healthcare providers and hospitals recognize Facebook pages as an important tool in the mix of their digital outreach and inbound marketing. But a significant challenge is to present interesting and share-able content that attracts, informs and engages. (And you’ve got to do all of that in a flash.)

By comparison, Twitter is a fast-rushing stream of social media. The mini-blog snippets of 140 characters or less fly past like LA freeway traffic. Facebook, on the other hand, generally presents content at a less-frenetic pace. But unless it’s interesting enough to arrest the visitor’s eye and attention, the typical visitor scrolls past your important marketing or branding message without notice.

This is where online video becomes a powerful (although not-so-secret) weapon in the battle for attention.

The engaging power of video on Facebook…

The human brain is wired for visual content; 90 percent of cerebral input is visual, which are then processed 60-thousand times faster than text. And, among these Facts About Online Video, the average website visit lasts a scant 48 seconds, but nearly six minutes when video is present.

By this measure, online video is 5.33 times more effective than text. Further, posts with video attract three times more inbound links than plain text, says SEOmoz.

What that means for Facebook page effectiveness is that your visual content drives engagement…in fact, according to the analytics outfit Simply Measured, “on Facebook, videos are shared 12 times more than links and text posts combined.” For more than a year now, Facebook timeline has favored visual (video and pictures) content, resulting in a 65 percent increase in engagement. [Check out this Infographic.]

Here’s the easy part. How to post a video to Facebook…

Fortunately, Facebook has made adding videos and images about as easy as it gets. (You probably already know this part.) Only three steps:

1. Click on Add Photos/Video at the top of your homepage.

2. Pick Upload Photos/Video to select a video file you have on your computer.

3. When your video is ready, click Post.

For the official “how-to,” see this Facebook Help page. And if you’re constantly on the go, Facebook provides the only-slightly-complicated instructions to upload images from a smartphone, iphone, ipad or feature phone.

Lonnie Hirsch