Minority users are more prone to watching videos on Facebook than the general population, and that surprising statistic has helped the social network expand its video features over the past two years.

According to data compiled by the Utah-based private research software company Qualtrics, Hispanic, African-American and Asian users in the United States are the groups responsible for viewing sharing the most videos, El Comercio reported.

Latinos, for example, are 1.5 times more likely than the average user to watch Facebook videos several times a day, while their African-American and Asian counterparts are still 1.3 times more likely to do so. Most of the time, they choose to look at the recordings through their smartphones or tables, Qualtrics determined.

The company's findings have been noted with great interest at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, where strategists and programmers have long been working to more smoothly incorporate video into the world's largest social network.

Christian Martínez, the head of U.S. multicultural sales at Facebook, told CNET en Español that by the end of last year, more than 8 billion videos were being watched on the site every single day. (In order for Facebook to qualify a video as "watched," it has to play for at least 3 seconds.)

"The year 2015 was, without a doubt, the year of the video for Facebook," Martínez said. "The quantity of video that is being shared on our newsfeed is insane."

The figures revealed by the Qualtrics survey are particularly encouraging for the company because Facebook has been emphasizing the Hispanic market for more than two years, CNET en Español stated. The firm wants to design strategies to draw in the Latino population and make the social network attractive for Hispanic advertisers, the technology publication explained.

Currently, meanwhile, companies trying to promote products on Facebook can already count on a Hispanic user base of more than 28 million individuals in the United States, company statistics reveal.