YouTube Gateway – Creating large thumbnails on Facebook posts

appstart-ytg-exampleFacebook shows only small thumbnails for Youtube videos in the feed, making their own videos much more prominent. The Appstart YouTube Gateway is a free tool that brings back full size thumbnails for Youtube videos.

Facebook video vs. Youtube

Facebook is trying to push their own video service and has taken measures to make it less sexy for users to use Googles’ Youtube on their platform – especially on the desktop. While Facebook renders its own videos with large thumbnails and play buttons, the preview attracts more clicks than the smaller, much less attractive way how Youtube videos are currently presented.

This is a problem, since there are enough studies that proof that users will more likely click on the larger presented pictures and videos than the smaller picture and text combo boxes. So with a smaller thumbnail your video will simply be less watched. Since Facebook is not showing the small/large thumbnail difference on all platforms equally, you might not even realize that your posted video actually looks “bad” on some platforms.

It is clear that Facebook wants you to upload all your videos directly to their platform only, instead of Youtube. So far Facebook has not yet taken the same path with videos from Vimeo – whatever that says about the importance of Vimeo. However I think the user should still have the decission about where to upload their videos and those videos should be presented in roughly the same way in the Facebook feed. You can see lots of media outlets addressing this by uploading the very same video to Youtube as well as to Facebook.

Luckily there’s help: The Appstart YouTube Gateway.

Bringing back large thumbnails

With some magic Appstart YouTube Gateway brings back the large thumbnails to the Facebook feed, including title and play button, on all platforms. Just like you actually want it for all Youtube videos anyway.

The tool itself is easy to use – simply copy the url of your Youtube video, go to the Appstart YouTube Gateway and paste it there. You will receive a new video link that you can use at Facebook, but also on all other platforms and channels, that will automatically render beautiful large thumbnails for all Youtube videos on all platforms. There is even a preview of how it will look like on Facebook.

[highlight background=”#bfe4ff”]http://www.appstart.info/youtubegateway/[/highlight]

 

Sounds complicated? Here is a quick one-minute video on how to use it.

Advanced usage

If you don’t want to use the tools’ website for each and every video, you can also “build” the new video link yourself. You just need to take the Youtube video id and use this with the appstart service.

Examples

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGqiSs9n4RA
https://youtu.be/kGqiSs9n4RA

become…

http://ytg.appstart.co/kGqiSs9n4RA

 

Easy, isn’t it? If you see something breaking or know of other services that need a tool like this or simply like the tool, leave a comment below.

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