Vine may be dead, but it casts a long shadow.
If you’ve ever seen a video from the Paul brothers or heard a Shawn Mendes song, you’ve felt the legacy of Vine. Many creators and online celebrities got their start creating 6-second loops on the short-lived platform.
Vine died in 2017, but right as it was shutting down, China’s ByteDance was creating another short-form video platform: TikTok. By 2018, TikTok was the most-downloaded app on the App Store. By the early 2020s, competitors started copying its features in an attempt to reclaim its rapidly-expanding market share. Instagram and Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts and TikTok all share the same DNA: short-form videos in a vertical format, served on an algorithmic, endlessly-scrolling timeline.
As of April 2024, TikTok has 1.5 billion monthly active users. YouTube data suggests that over 164 million of their most active users are watching Shorts, with over two billion monthly watchers. Facebook and Instagram Reels statistics are similarly impressive — and it’s clear that a majority of social media users worldwide are watching and creating short-form video. It’s here to stay, and you need to understand it.
Let’s take a look at what short-form video teaches us about the current content landscape.
What Defines “Short-Form?”
Vine had a limit of 6 seconds on its videos. Modern platforms are less restrictive. YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels have an upper limit of 60 seconds. TikTok has increased its upper boundary to 10 minutes.
There’s no hard and fast definition of “short-form video” length, but given that most short-form video platforms top out at 60 seconds, it seems like a good measure to go by.
In addition, a short-form video must be self-contained. Each video is a separate, bite-sized piece of content. That doesn’t mean they can’t be serialized, or tell an ongoing story, but they should be digestible as standalone content.
So a short-form video is a video that’s under 60 seconds long that functions as a standalone piece of content. (Keep that in mind. It’s important.)
Why is Short-Form Video So Popular?
Short-form video has had a rocket-ship rise to popularity. And one of the biggest factors driving that rise is attention span.
You’ve probably heard “modern audiences have an attention span shorter than a goldfish” before. That old saying is false (I tracked it to the original source years ago for an article I ghostwrote … that’s another story), but the idea is true. Researcher Gloria Mark began tracking attention spans in 2003 and found the average then was 2.5 minutes. By 2019, the average attention span had dropped to about 47 seconds.
There are a ton of factors that go into attention span, including multiple screens, notifications and prompts and other distractions. Functional attention time can be much lower than that. But as a general rule, the average human attention span fits perfectly within the space of a single short-form video.
What TikTok introduced was an endless wheel of algorithmically-driven attention snacks — short videos perfectly tailored to grab the user’s eye. And that’s what’s driven the rise of short-form video, through TikTok and its competitors Reels and Shorts.
Everything Starts with Attention
Marketers understand that without attention, we can’t sell. I keep Claude Hopkins’s classic Scientific Advertising on my desk bookshelf; it’s a hundred years old, and attention was something he saw as essential even then. But the competition has heated up.
“People will not be bored in print,” Hopkins wrote in 1923. “They may listen politely at a dinner table to boasts and personalities, life history, etc. But in print they choose their own companions, their own subjects.”
Hopkins understood that unless he offered something that grabbed people’s attention immediately, they’d move on to “their own companions, their own subjects.” But in his media landscape, radio had just started and television didn’t exist. Newspapers, magazines and direct mail were the primary methods of outreach for marketers.
Fast forward to today. About half of the world’s population has access to more information than has ever existed before … in the palm of their hands. Hopkins would have killed for the tools we have at our disposal, but instead of competing against a handful of other advertisers, we’re up against the entire Internet.
Despite that, short-form video gives you a fighting chance to be seen, because it’s tailor-made to grab the attention of your audience.
What Makes Short-Form Video Marketing-Friendly?
Short-form video on platforms like TikTok, Reels and Shorts has several advantages.
- Algorithmic discoverability. I constantly see people sitting and thumb scrolling through TikTok — at the bar counter at R&J’s Supper Club, sitting at a table with headphones in at Cafe Evoke, waiting for their number to be called at the Waterloo Tag Agency. The algorithms learn what those people like and offer it to them by subject, meaning you can wind up on people’s radar overnight in a way that rarely happens elsewhere.
- Ease of access. Smartphone penetration worldwide is at 70%. In first-world countries like the USA it’s even higher. Anyone with a smartphone can download one of these apps, create a free account and have an endless stream of entertainment at their fingertips. Monthly active users for the major short-form video platforms number in the billions. Video reaches past language barriers and accessibility issues in a way text can’t. And text is more challenging to engage with on a mobile device, while video is easy. If a picture is a thousand words, a video is a thousand pictures.
- Comprehension. Reading takes effort. Most people comprehend video or audio faster than text. A person can take in the information in a picture in about 13 milliseconds — faster than any other way in which we consume information. As the Bonn Institute notes, images also have higher recall, stronger emotional impact and are more likely to elicit engagement. This makes video the most impactful of all major content types, because it combines pictures, audio and text.
What Does the Short-Form Video Trend Mean for You?
We’re not here to tell you “do short-form video or else,” — although if you haven’t carefully considered it, it’s now long past time to decide how and where it might work for your business.
We do, however, think that this trend points up some important details about how people are consuming content.
- People are consuming most of their content on mobile devices. The majority of global web traffic now belongs to smart devices, not desktop or laptop computers.
- Mobile devices have less screen space, making them tough to read on. This has driven a rise in alternative forms of content which are more convenient — particularly podcasts and short-form video.
- Most people touch their smartphone over 2,600 times per day. That means it’s in their hands whenever they have a moment of downtime. If you want to catch people in those in-between moments, your content must be bite-size.
Applying Short-Form Tactics to Long-Form Pillars
Because of the way people consume content now, short-form video itself is a powerful tool to get people interested in your long-form content.
I’ll give you a real-world example. I’ve been listening to comedians like Bill Burr and Norm Macdonald off and on for years; YouTube has noticed. Now that Shorts are a thing, individual comedians, comedy venues and comedy shows are all posting chunks of their best material there. I discovered a couple of really funny comedians like Jordan Jensen from Shorts of their work, which led me to watching their longer sets and looking for tickets when they come to town.
The short-form and long-form videos they post on their channels include the same content, but the shorts are re-cut with captions and a call to action and link at the end.
Like those comedians, if you have good long-form content, you have good short-form content. It’s just a matter of cutting and packaging.
Here are some ideas for how you can repurpose your existing content pillars to take advantage of short-form video:
Blog: Chunk blogs up into short-form video by turning one of the main points of the article into a minute-long slideshow. Canva and other layout tools can help with this. Either read the text yourself as a voiceover or use the text-to-speech tools included in major editors like CapCut.
You can also deliver whole blogs as videos in a longer format, posting the video at the top of the blog post (for fast comprehension or mobile engagement) and putting the transcript below. This gives you the flexibility to catch both the mobile or on-the-go user and the person who wants to sit down and digest.
Audio: You’re coming from a different starting place than a blog post, but the same techniques work for audio — in fact, they may be easier, since you already have part of the work done. Use sound bites from key sections of a podcast over pictures or a visualization. Posting these on social media is very common for podcasts to drive engagement.
Video: Video is the easiest to adapt. Try cutting the most interesting chunks into short vertical videos and posting them with captioning. Make sure you include a plug for your main channel at the end.
Take Advantage of Short-Form Video
The rise of short-form video is a perfect storm of shortened attention spans, ease of access, smarter algorithms and increased competition for attention. It’s a highly-engaging medium because it mixes three different content types (images, audio and text) into one. Ignore it at your peril — or get on and ride the wave.
Even if you’re not using short-form video yourself, don’t pass up on the content marketing insights it gives us. Understand how to grab attention and you’ll be a marketing success story on every platform you use. Need a hand? We can help — we do it for businesses like yours all the time. Just drop us a line, anytime.
Best Regards,
David Brandon
Copywriter
Rainmaker Digital Services