YouTube is the biggest video website in the world. Over a billion hours of video are watched each day. But while YouTube is the primary home for videos on the internet, there are other places worth uploading your videos to in order to reach a wider audience.
In this post, we provide a comprehensive list of other websites and social platforms that can deliver a significant number of views. We also go into detail about the kind of content that works well on each one.
Although a very broad and multifaceted social network, it’s right to consider Facebook as the second-biggest video platform on the web behind YouTube. The discovery infrastructure is much more passive than YouTube, because the platform gives you silent autoplaying content via a feed. However, Facebook can be an important method of video distribution for a wide range of content.
Facebook’s audience is extremely wide-ranging and covers many demographics. So if you’re creating content for YouTube, you should consider having some video presence on Facebook as well.
Do note that the kind of content which works well on YouTube doesn’t normally work as well on Facebook. 95% of Facebook video views are silent, and people quickly skip past videos. This means that if you want to generate interest, your videos need to looks attractive. In addition, they need to work reasonably well with captions instead of audio.
Also a platform from Meta, Instagram works similarly to Facebook. Especially in terms of its content discovery and primarily app-centric user experience. With over a billion monthly users, mostly under the age of 35, Instagram is a great way to reach younger people.
Videos formats are, however, more restrictive than Facebook. For example, video length is limited to 10 minutes. Instagram is also centered around visually appealing content, and quick, entertaining snacks. Lectures, screencasts, and dry tutorial videos don’t work well. That’s why it’s better to post a smaller subset of your creative marketing content on Instagram.
LinkedIn is almost the reverse of Instagram from a content style perspective, even though it retains similar format restrictions. Here, talking heads, lectures, and software tutorials tend to work very well. Content doesn’t need to be as visually appealing as on Instagram. Because LinkedIn also has a maximum video length of 10 minutes, it’s a great website to post casual and short B2B content.
However, LinkedIn’s search and content discovery functions are fairly underdeveloped compared with YouTube and Facebook. That’s why it can be good to repost the same content multiple times over a period of weeks and months to maximize its reach.
As with LinkedIn, video content tends to have a short shelf life on Twitter. But Twitter is still an incredibly useful means of distributing videos. Due to a short video length limit (2 minutes and 20 seconds), you won’t be able to fully show your YouTube videos on Twitter. That’s why we recommend to share clips or trailers of longer videos on Twitter, and link to the full video on YouTube or your website. This can be an effective way of getting the most from the platform.
Reddit is an often-overlooked platform for video distribution. But it has a native functionality supporting videos up to 15 minutes in length. Not to mention, an engaged communities on almost every topic imaginable. Content also doesn’t need to hit the front page to deliver meaningful returns. Users often find older content through long-tail Google searches as well. That’s why we recommend you to consider Reddit as a source of meaningful video views over a longer period of time.
Reddit does have a downside, however. You often need to do quite a bit of work in advance to determine which subreddits it will be most appropriate to post your videos to. Additionally, you need to build up accounts with genuine authority through sustained engagement. Otherwise, moderators won’t accept your submissions. As a general rule, you should be sparing and thoughtful about where to post your videos. We advise you only submit videos to subreddits where your content will be genuinely appreciated.
These days, Vimeo is primarily a video hosting platform aimed at businesses. But it does still have a public-facing directory and a search engine for videos. Highly creative and polished content is the order of the day for Vimeo rather than lower-cost talking head videos or screencasts. However, branded content and advertorials can perform well.
Platforms not mentioned
Note that the list above doesn’t include video hosting platforms like Wistia, Cincopa or VideoPress. That’s because they are hosting platforms that don’t have a native distribution functionality. We also didn’t mention TikTok, since it requires users to create content specifically for the platform in-app, rather than upload an existing media asset. Twitch is similarly restrictive. It only supports live-streamed videos, which is why it isn’t included in this list.
Also missing from this list are platforms that used to have bing public directories but have since restricted uploading to them, such as DailyMotion, or emerging new platforms with small numbers of users, such as DTube.
If there’s an obvious candidate you think we’ve missed, please do let us know in the comments!
11 September 2024
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