Short videos on social media are nothing new (anyone remember the once hugely-popular Vine?), but lately they have been taking the social media marketing world by storm. We are now at the point where the majority of videos are under 2 minutes long, and even that’s pushing it – most viewers will only watch a business-related video if it’s under a minute.
So how has social media been reacting to this short video marketing craze? Let’s take a look at some of the most popular platforms.
TikTok Continues to Lead the Pack
When you think of short videos, what platform immediately comes to mind? TikTok, of course! This increasingly popular platform officially reached over a billion users in 2021, underlining the demand for shorter video formats.
While a lot of businesses have yet to fully take advantage of TikTok, others have found success without doing a thing. Take the brand Ocean Spray, for example. Their product was featured in a popular short TikTok video without their involvement, yet they still earned nearly 15 billion media impressions in under a month. Clearly, short video marketing can get a brand a lot of attention on TikTok.
Instagram Embrances Short Videos with Reels – and Drops IGTV
Instagram Reels first debuted in 2020, and allows users to record and edit their own 15-second videos. If you think this sounds eerily similar to TikTok, you’re right – in fact, 87% of TikTok users consider Instagram Reels to be basically the same thing. This is a good thing for Instagram, as 61% of those users plan to spend more time on the platform due to this similarity.
With the success of its short video features, Instagram decided to retire IGTV in 2021 – at least, in a way. It’s now called Instagram TV, and allows users to post up to 1-hour long videos to the main Instagram feed.
Even though the option for longer videos is there, social media marketers may want to stick with the Reels feature for now. After all, the videos that receive the most comments on Instagram tend to only be about 26 seconds long.
YouTube Has Entered the Chat
YouTube has always been the place to go for long-form videos, but now they’ve joined the short video format game as well. YouTube Shorts was just launched in 2021, and was already generating over 15 billion daily views by the summer. Part of the reason YouTube Shorts found so much success so quickly may be the $100 million fund that it set up to encourage creators to use the platform.
Indeed, that money likely steered a lot of creators their way, but what about businesses? For businesses, YouTube has TrueView, its main advertising technology. It allows advertisers to promote videos of any length, though users can often skip some of them after the first 5 seconds.
Though they can promote them, long videos still don’t get the same kind of engagement as short ones. Nearly 60% of people may forgo watching a video altogether if they feel it’s too long. Therefore, YouTube now offers 6 second ads that are non-skippable. This is likely due to the fact that the clickthrough rate of ads between 15 – 30 seconds is a staggering 70%, a huge number for businesses.
