Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms, with billions of users worldwide. Many people use Facebook to share photos, updates, and videos with friends, family, and followers. When you post a video on Facebook, it may get views from people in your network as well as complete strangers if your post is public.
A common question that arises is – can you see who viewed your videos on Facebook? The short answer is no, Facebook does not have a built-in feature that shows you who exactly has watched your videos. However, there are some workarounds and third-party tools that can provide insights into your video views.
Why Facebook Doesn’t Allow You To See Video Viewers
There are a few reasons why Facebook does not allow users to see who viewed their videos:
- Privacy – Facebook prioritizes user privacy and restricting access to data about who viewed videos aligns with that priority.
- Data restrictions – Facebook’s data policy does not allow storing or showing data linking specific users to specific video views.
- Feature not provided – The ability to see video viewers has simply not been a feature Facebook has chosen to provide at this time.
- Prevent stalking/harassment – Showing video viewers could enable stalking or harassment scenarios that Facebook prefers to avoid.
Facebook product managers have stated the desire to balance video performance insights with user privacy. So standard Facebook analytics will show aggregate views and other data, but won’t link views to specific people.
Video Insights Provided by Facebook
Although you can’t see exactly who viewed your video, Facebook does provide some useful video analytics and insights. On Facebook, you can see:
- Total number of video views
- Average duration of views
- Total number of minutes viewed
- Average % of video watched
- Number of times video was shared
- Demographics data on age, gender, location (at aggregate level)
This information can give you a sense of how well your video is performing and who it is reaching, but again will not show data on specific viewers.
Using Facebook Ads to Gauge Video Viewers
One workaround is to run a Facebook ad campaign with your video. When running paid video ads, the Facebook Ads Manager provides more in-depth analytics on video views.
With Facebook ad reporting, you can see metrics like:
- Number of video views by people’s age and gender
- Number of views by location
- Views/reach for different placements – Instagram, Messenger, etc.
This information could give you a sense of who your target audience is on Facebook. However, you still will not see data on exactly who viewed your ad and video.
Using Third-Party Analytics for More Insights
Some third-party social media analytics tools can connect to Facebook and provide more video insights beyond what the native analytics offer. Tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Socialbakers, and others can give you analytics on Facebook video performance.
Here are some of the additional metrics you can get:
- Video views over time – see spikes and trends
- Views by source – Facebook, Instagram, etc
- Compare videos side-by-side
- Viewers’ actions after watching video – clicks, follows, etc
So third-party tools give a more in-depth look at video analytics. However, they still do not provide viewer identity due to Facebook’s privacy restrictions. But they can help shine more light on video performance beyond Facebook’s built-in options.
Tips to Increase Facebook Video Views
While you can’t see exactly who is viewing your Facebook videos, you can take steps to increase views and reach a larger audience. Here are some tips:
Optimize Video Thumbnail
The thumbnail image that appears in your video preview can greatly impact click-through rate. Having an eye-catching image relevant to the video topic will get more clicks.
Use Best Practices for Video Length
Shorter videos tend to perform better on Facebook. Try keeping videos under one minute if possible. No more than 2-3 minutes maximum is ideal.
Post at High Traffic Times
Posting your video when your target audience is most active on Facebook will mean more potential views. Early evening and weekends tend to see more Facebook traffic.
Engage Viewers in Captions
Add captions that prompt viewers to take an action like “comment below your favorite part”. This engages viewers and may lead to more reach.
Promote Outside of Facebook
Also share your video on other channels beyond Facebook, like Twitter or email marketing. This expands your potential audience and video views.
Facebook Video Viewer Tracking Tools (Limited Data)
While native Facebook does not show video viewers, there are some limited workarounds that attempt to track Facebook video viewers. However, these tools have significant limitations:
- They often rely on collecting limited public data profiles, so they only work for public videos not private ones.
- They can really only make estimates or show aggregate level data.
- Ethically, tracking individuals in this way without consent is questionable.
Some of these limited tools include:
Quintly
Quintly is a social media analytics tool that claims to track Facebook video viewers, including showing locations. But again this is based on limited public data profiles.
Socialinsider
Socialinsider is another analytics tool that says it can show video viewer locations and demographic data through public profile data collection.
SocialBakers
SocialBakers analytics says it can show estimated locations of Facebook video viewers. But it is not clear how accurate this actually is.
In summary, these tools only provide rough estimates of video viewers based on limited data. They do not have access to Facebook’s actual video view data.
Conclusion
Facebook restricts the ability to see exactly who viewed your videos due to privacy concerns and other product considerations. While you can’t see your specific video viewers’ identities, Facebook does provide useful aggregate analytics like views, shares, demographics etc.
Some potential workarounds include running video ads or using third-party analytics tools for more insights. However, limitations exist here as well. There are also some outside tools claiming to estimate video viewers based on public data, but these have accuracy issues.
Best practices for optimizing your video content, titles, thumbnails, captions, and promotions can help increase the reach and views for your videos without needing to know exactly who watched them.
Under Facebook’s current policies, there is no perfect solution to see exactly who viewed your videos. Focusing on creating compelling content and using available aggregate analytics is likely your best path to Facebook video success.