How do I upload a video to Facebook?

I’ve also heard that Facebook’s algorithms favor those videos uploaded directly to the popular social media service over those posts where you link to a video that’s actually hosted on YouTube. Since YouTube is a Google property and Google and Facebook are aggressive competitors, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to learn that this really is true and that Facebook favors its own. Makes sense to me!

The biggest downside is that you don’t then get a neat unified count of video views: upload a video to Facebook and YouTube and each will have its own count, something that might be important to you, especially if it’s a commercial video that you’re working with or want to show others how popular it’s become. But perhaps someone will figure out a fix. Or we’ll just have to continue living in the fragmented world of the modern Internet.

Uploading a video is pretty easy, but there’s one stumbling block that is demonstrated immediately if you try to follow the suggestions and just drag your video clip onto the status update window:

All looks legit here, right? Ah, but when you “release” the image that you’re dragging and dropping, you find out that the “Drop Photo” really is just for photos: the video clip vanishes.

Instead, you need to click on Add Photos/Video immediately above the update entry area:

Click on that link and a file selection window pops up…

In this instance, mine has the scintillating and memorable name of “2015-02-01 11.08.10.mov”.

I select that, click “Open” and, well, not much happens:

That’s because the video actually uploads after you click Post.

I’ll click the Post button and you can see what occurs:

Depending on the size of your video footage, this can take anywhere from a few seconds to 15 minutes or more. It’s critical you stay on this page and don’t move away while that’s happening. Best to just do something else…

Eventually it’ll upload, and you’re still not done:

At this point Facebook is actually recoding the video itself to work on all the many Facebook delivery platforms. This usually is a 5-10 minute process, at the end of which you’ll get a notification like this:

Oops, you can see that as soon as it showed up on my timeline, two of my friends liked it. I mean, it’s a cute video about my foosball-loving kitten. Who wouldn’t like that? (you can see for yourself: Dave’s Talented Kitten Playing Foosball).

Hope that helps you get your own video footage on Facebook!