In a fast-paced world where every second counts and our ability to focus is continually diminishing, a new kind of content has emerged as the star of the show: short-form content. Back in the early days of social media, YouTube dominated the video space, and then Vine arrived. Short, fun, bite-sized user-generated videos, poised to captivate, educate, and entertain within 15 seconds. And then poof, it vanished off the face of social media. Slowly from the background, a new heavyweight icon appears: cue in TikTok and TikTok clones, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.
The Proof Of Short Form Content Is In The Pudding
Based on the most recent marketing strategy and trends report from HubSpot, it is projected that the popularity of short-form video content will keep growing in 2023. The report indicates that 90% of marketers worldwide are planning to increase or sustain their investment in short-form videos for the current year.
Another report from HubSpot, the 2023 Social Media Marketing Report shows that social media marketers are gearing up to heavily emphasize short-form video content this year. The report surveyed over 1,000 marketers, revealing that 33 percent of them intend to prioritize investment in this relatively recent format during 2023. Brands that get the formula right can leverage strong and highly engaging content that resonates with millions of its users.
Why Short-Form Content Should Be In Your Arsenal
Let’s face it, attention spans are officially at an all-time low. Here is why you should be making the most of your short-form content.
- Highly tractable content: It is straightforward to hop on to trends and create flashy, eye-catching videos on various topics in a digestible format.
- Easy-to-consume content: Short-form videos can compress large swathes of information into under a minute, making it easy for users to consume more content.
- Cost-effective approach for high-quality video: Short-form videos are much easier to create than long-form and can be broken up into different parts for better reach.
- Encourages viewer participation: This can easily create a sense of community and facilitate participation through your engaging content.
- Higher potential to scale rapidly: TikTok’s algorithm gives brands and users the unique potential to go viral overnight when the algorithm matches your high-quality content with the right users.
5 Current Short-Form Trends to Capitalize On
Incorporate UGC (User-Generated Content): User-generated content is now an essential asset in a brand’s marketing strategy playbook, with UGC being an authentic, high-traction, and reliable way of engaging with your audience through fun and relevant challenges, trends, etc.
Create Fun Challenges: The internet is all for challenges. Coming up with easy fun challenges that involve your users’ family and friends is a great way of building a loyal following highlighting the positive aspects of your brand and ultimately boosting awareness.
BTS (Behind-the-scenes) Content on The Rise: A lot of content creators have multiple channels that showcase a lot of the hard work and fun clips that do not make the final cut. Fans like to engage with this content as it shows a genuine and human side behind the glamorous facades that the creators put on.
Leverage Customer Testimonials: There’s nothing like customer testimonials that bring your brand’s good work to life by showing users how other users feel about your product/services. Unscripted, creative testimonials have proven to be highly effective in boosting lower-funnel engagement.
Microlearning/ Educational Content: Microlearning is when you condense product tutorials into fun-sized clips, and good educational content goes a long way in building user relationships boosting engagement, and nurturing purchase decisions.
Give Short Form Video Content A Shot and You Won’t Regret It.
In our humble opinion, we believe that short-form video content has become a staple of the internet and with marketers constantly fighting for screen time, there’s no better time to get started with short-form content now. So give it a try and see how it goes!
