Short-form content is social’s best friend

Whether you’re posting it or consuming it, short-form content for social is winning on every platform. Videos that seem to be decreasing in length and copy that’s becoming more and more brief are telling us one thing; ‘I just don’t have the patience’.

As marketers, it’s not easy telling an SME or a C-suite exec that their thought-leadership piece cannot just be copy and pasted onto LinkedIn, or the video of them talking to a static camera (without captions) is not really going to entice anyone into doing anything other than reach for a pillow.

So we know video is king on social – blah blah blah – we’ve all heard it. But what’s interesting is the brevity in which it’s consumed. Consumer attention spans are shortening to as much as 8.25 seconds – in a world where we were told how to explain our workings when growing up, we’re now being told to get to the facts and quick.

So that ‘short clip’ you made that’s 1min long, is very unlikely to reach full viewership. In fact, to quote Springboard in 2023 – 58% of viewers will finish watching videos in under a minute. But if the video is over 20 minutes, only 24% of them will finish the video.

In 2024, you can be sure these percentages have grown. It’s a trend that doesn’t show signs of stopping.

TikTok, Facebook, Instagram – and now LinkedIn – are all pushing short video feeds; essentially TikTok led the way before Insta’s reels came into play. They’re here to stay and they’re growing. For B2B it may seem difficult to understand how this may work, but there are many many ways of making those videos you have work for it.

Consider:

  • Provocative soundbites
  • Statistical insights
  • Hook terms; AI, for example – will get people’s attention

Also, remember mobile first – vertical formats are key to proper consumption!

Intrigued? Well, we’ve some other ideas here in our resources section that can help you with any campaign and any platform: https://immediatefuture.co.uk/resources/

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