It’s Facebook Friday — each week we’ll offer one tip for leveraging Facebook to increase customer awareness of and engagement with your brand or business. This week we’ll consider all the angles: Should you upload videos directly to your Facebook Page, or share YouTube-hosted videos on Facebook instead?

First, let’s talk about the advantages to using Facebook. As you probably already know, the social network to rule all social networks is rapidly approaching a billion users.

When you upload your videos directly to Facebook, you don’t have to manage two separate online presences. Comments on the video on Facebook all happen within Facebook, whereas sharing from YouTube means you’ll have to track comments and engagement on both the source video’s page at YouTube, and on the sharing post you send out to your Facebook Page fans.

Sticking to just Facebook can save you some time. When you upload a video to Facebook, you can also include it in a media gallery visible in your Timeline so fans don’t have to make that extra leap to YouTube to just see your videos without clutter from other kinds of content.

Why We Suggest Hosting Your Videos on YouTube

All that said, we believe that most businesses and brands would be better served by uploading their videos to YouTube. It’s handy that Facebook offers a video hosting service, but the truth is metrics firm comCast has ranked Facebook below many other video sharing sites in terms of viewership despite the social network’s massive number of members.

Facebook videos also can’t be embedded on your blog, but YouTube videos can. And YouTube videos get special placement in Google searches — not to mention the fact that you might find extra brand exposure from the folks who use YouTube itself. Choosing Facebook as your video hosting service means your content will live only within Facebook’s walls — and it’ll be very difficult for people to find it from other places on the web.

YouTube offers a ton of features that Facebook doesn’t, including annotations, suggestions to viewers for the next videos to watch, a more sophisticated channel landing page for your brand, automatic subtitles for accessibility, and for brands or publishers that reach a certain scale, YouTube has monetization options.

Once a video has been uploaded to YouTube, it’s extremely easy to share it to your Page’s Facebook Timeline. If you have the time to manage both (and YouTube on its own shouldn’t take nearly as much time to manage as Facebook), then uploading to YouTube and then sharing from YouTube to Facebook will greatly increase your business or brand’s exposure to consumers. It’s hard to argue with that.

Was this tip helpful? Do you have any more ideas for getting the most out of Facebook? Let us know in the comments!

[Image credit: Evan Hahn]