Digital marketers have played down the importance of video in campaigns, and claimed a dramatic re-rating of Facebook's viewer numbers would not require a significant strategy re-evaluation.
New figures from Nielsen, revealed by Mumbrella earlier this month, indicated that Facebook streaming numbers were down 94 per cent after the data analytics business reassessed how it measures Facebook's video views.
This followed an admission by the social media giant that it had overestimated its numbers alarmingly by counting people watching as little as three seconds of an auto-play video.
When Nielsen adjusted its calculations, Facebook's streaming figures fell from 9.94 billion in September to 560 million in October, YouTube meanwhile recorded 2.81 billion views in September.
Reload Media senior digital marketing consultant Daniel Howe told The Australian Financial Review the huge drop off in viewers reinforced a view that Google-owned YouTube was a more potent option for the video component of campaign strategies.
"I never personally bought into Facebook being a bigger video platform than YouTube, as was touted around last year," he said.
"Facebook's ability to know so much about users makes it a fantastic tool for marketers. It is however still very important to choose the right medium to convey your message to the audience. Video therefore typically is part of any campaign that we would run but plays a different role each time."
Core part of strategy
While Mr Howe remained convinced that video remains a core part of digital and social marketing strategy, others believe its importance has become over-played.
Founder of Melbourne-based digital strategy agency ntegrity Richenda Vermeulen said video generally played only a minor component of broader campaigns.
She said she was largely unperturbed by the Nielsen figures, and wasn't dramatically altering her approach to campaigns.
"Videos play a role, but to be honest it's a small role," Ms Vermeulen said.
"Facebook is an important channel, but our numbers don't show that video engagement matters more than other forms of engagement like pictures, which are much cheaper to develop. So video is only a small part of a much bigger and richer marketing picture."
Despite this, Ms Vermeulen said one of the biggest advantages of digital advertising mediums like Facebook was the greater transparency around return on investment.
"There is a big issue with transparency in our industry and some agencies take advantage of customers' lack of acumen and profit off it. Digital is the most transparent advertising channel you have, but consequently it's poked at," she said.
"To me, the Facebook figures were no surprise at all. [If a marketer] has low digital acumen they will look at it and say 'let's put less money on Facebook and more on YouTube', but if they have higher digital acumen then they look at it as a small part of a larger customer journey."
Preferential treatment
In March 2014 Facebook introduced premium autoplay videos ads, hoping to convince advertisers that its platform was more valuable than traditional TV networks because of its targeting and analytics.
To combat the issue of marketers paying for ads that users may have just scrolled past, in June 2015 it also introduced a pricing model that let advertisers only pay for views of the ad that lasted more than 10 seconds.
But Mr Howe said one of the big issues with Facebook for marketers to consider was the social media network's seemingly preferential treatment of certain posts.
"Facebook seems to prefer and reward using certain mediums and features over others," he said.
"When Facebook Live was initially released, all fans received notifications, and when it enabled gifs to play automatically within news feeds, these seemed to receive greater attention than say a static post. I don't have evidence for this, but it's based off the learnings from clients we have worked with – jumping on the new stuff rolled out by Facebook seems to pay dividends."
