We look at three important metrics for Facebook video publishers to monitor and review.
Last week we looked at the growth of video on Facebook, and pointed out how engagement rates on video are growing significantly for publishers.
With more videos being posted to Facebook, it can be tricky to figure out how to measure what’s working best. This is where analytics can prove invaluable.
We picked out three metrics you should be looking at when measuring the impact of your video content on Facebook.
1) Unique Viewers
Some of the most popular Facebook native videos attract astronomical view counts every week.
For instance, one of BuzzFeed Video’s most popular videos in February has 36.2 million views since it was published on February 23.
[fb_pe url=”https://www.facebook.com/BuzzFeedVideo/videos/1927538107387062/” bottom=”30″]
But many of the most popular videos on Facebook have a Vine-like quality that encourages watching over and over again. In particular, action and sports videos are likely to be watched numerous times by the same person.
So what’s the actual number of people engaging with each clip?
The ‘unique viewers’ metric in Facebook page insights helps here. It shows the number of individual people who saw the clip, which in turn can help figure out what the ‘repeatability’ of your videos is like.
2) Average Completion Rate
Given that a view of a video on Facebook is counted as 3 seconds of view-time (even though a recent update means you can now look at the number of views over 10 seconds), completion rates can count for a lot.
Facebook’s average completion measurement shows the portion of the video that’s viewed in an average session. You can dig in further here to see views of the video at any moment as a percentage of total views.
This is very useful for honing your video content, and identifying elements that may be causing viewers to drop off.
Again, you can access this metric in the ‘Page Insights’ section of your Facebook page.
3) Average Engagement Rates
We know that engagements like shares and comments help signal content worth seeing, reading and watching to Facebook’s news feed algorithm.
Sharing activity leads to more views, essentially acting as a broadcasting mechanism for native videos.
NewsWhip’s Insights tool quickly shows average share rates of any Facebook post format, including video.
For instance, this screenshot shows the engagement on videos posted to AJ+’s Facebook page in February.
It shows us the number of videos posted to the page during the month (232), the average share and like rate for videos, and the total interactions for shares and likes.
This is very useful for benchmarking engagement performance versus competitors, tracking output, and crucially, honing in on what videos are attracting the most engagement.
Used in conjunction with the unique view data, this can provide publishers with powerful insights into how their video strategy is playing out in news feeds.
Finally: it’s important to place these numbers in the context of the content itself. Most of the most successful Facebook videos are extremely short: it certainly isn’t as if each ‘like’ represents someone sitting down to watch an entire HBO documentary.
As Facebook’s Head of Partnerships, Kevin Rose puts it in a new interview: “If you think about how people engage on Facebook today, it’s not really around watching three hours of video.”
But if you’re already seeing gains with Facebook video, this certainly won’t come as a surprise.
Try Spike to see the videos taking off on Facebook in real time
