“Sociable” is the most recent commentary on essential social media developments and trends from industry expert Andrew Hutchinson of Social Media Today.
There’s been an interesting shift in video consumption of late, which could impact your video strategy: Longer short videos are now seemingly gaining more traction with audiences.
So by “longer short” videos, we’re not talking a few shift back to long-form content of 5 minutes or more. But what’s seemingly happening, based on the announcements from each app, is that customers are now more willing to have interaction with 3-minute-long videos, versus 30-second uploads.
In January, Instagram prolonged Reels to three minutes, after previously reporting that videos longer than 90 seconds didn’t perform as well, while YouTube has also made 3-minute-long clips eligible for the Shorts feed.
60-90 seconds was once the sweet spot, but now, the platforms are shifting to barely longer clips, with a view to encouraging more engagement.
And the identical is now evident on TikTok as well, as demonstrated in Buffer’s latest research report, which looks at TikTok viewing trends, based on evaluation of 1.1 million TikTok clips.
As per Buffer:
“TikTok videos that are longer than one minute get 63.8% more watch time than videos within the 30-60 second range.”
As you’ll be able to see on this chart, longer videos get more reach, by an enormous margin, though Buffer’s data doesn’t specify a video length beyond one minute.
The same goes for watch time, with longer videos driving more engagement.
That then sends a positive signal to TikTok’s algorithm that that is relevant and interesting content, which likely influences the primary chart above as well.
So, essentially, TikTok’s seeing the identical shift as other platforms, in longer short videos getting more attention. Again, this doesn’t mean that try to be trying to post long-form epics to the app (TikTok’s upload limit is 10 minutes), nevertheless it may offer you some additional food for thought with regard to what’s driving engagement, and the way you’ll be able to maximize your video efforts.
You can read Buffer’s full study report here.
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