Take Facebook video stats with a grain of salt

Or sometimes a pound of salt. While Facebook is still one of the best ways to get your videos seen, it is important to note that Facebook inflates its own video stats.

For instance, an initial look at stats for a video post shows this:

However, many people have their Facebook account set up so that when a video appears in their feed, it automatically starts playing without sound. If the video plays for just 3 seconds, Facebook counts that as a view. Again, that is often 3 seconds without audio. For these 28,000 views noted, the average view duration was 41 seconds. While that is better than 3 seconds, I am not sure I would call that "watching" the video.

A better metric is "clicked to play", shown here: 

This means people clicked on the video because they did not have the autoplay feature going or they did, but they wanted to hear the audio. The stat for this is 2,746. While not the 28k number above, it is at least a fairly solid 2,746. As you can see in the graph, people who clicked to play the video watched WAY more of it than the autoplay people.

Summary: Uploading videos to Facebook is still a good thing to do. But don't get carried away by the big numbers. Dig deeper and be honest with yourself about how many people you are genuinely connecting with.