In today’s digital landscape, the dominance of video is unparalleled! However, with attention spans declining, the competition for those fleeting moments of audience attention is more fierce than ever. Amidst this competition—short-form content emerges as a standout and remarkably effective tool for audience engagement and discovery.
In this comprehensive guide, we delve into the art of crafting compelling short-form video content. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, marketer, content creator, or music artist, this resource provides everything you need to kickstart your journey into short-form content. Inside, you’ll find a curated list of recommended tools and resources to help you start producing short-form content right away
What is Short Form Content Anyway?
Short-form video, as the name implies, consists of brief clips lasting less than 90 seconds, strategically designed to captivate the audience and convey messages quickly. They are meant to be uploaded on various social media platforms, with a particular emphasis on platforms like TikTok (credited with popularizing this format) and Instagram Reels.
On these platforms, short-form content takes center stage, seamlessly appearing one after another as users scroll through their feeds. This constant stream of videos, tailored to each user’s tastes, makes short-form content a powerful tool for rapid audience engagement and serves as the ultimate means for discovery on social media.
Why should short-form content be included in your content strategy for 2024?
Embracing short-form content in your social media strategy for 2024 comes with several advantages. As you strategize and plan your content for the upcoming year, consider the following reasons to incorporate short-form content into your social media strategy.
1. Exposure and reach
The algorithms are hungry for short-form content, presenting a golden opportunity for your content to go viral and reach a huge audience. With billions of users on these platforms, the potential to showcase your brand, product, or music to a vast audience is substantial. Capitalize on this potential by crafting engaging short-form content that not only attracts new followers, but also garners support from customers, listeners, and clients alike.
2. Increased engagement
In addition to being highly engaging, short-form content is also highly shareable. And your audience is asking for it. An eye-opening 66% of social media consumers say they prefer to watch short-form videos to learn about products and services. Short-form content aligns with the fast-paced lifestyles of today’s audiences, encouraging higher levels of engagement as users can quickly consume these bite-sized pieces of information and respond to the content without feeling overwhelmed by lengthy content.
3. Increased brand loyalty
Short-form content is a catalyst to help you foster a deeper emotional connection and understanding of your brand with your audience. Those bite-sized pieces of content, enable you to craft compelling narratives that give insight into your brand story, deliver key messages, and communicate your values in your own words.
During a single rollout, a band can use a short-form video to show secret footage of your band’s reaction to hearing the final version of your song for the first time. This type of content portrays your human side to your audience, allowing them to identify with you more. These fans, in turn, become the superfans who are willing to push play when your album releases and buy your merch when it drops.
What platforms are best for uploading short-form content?
Now that you have been inspired to make short-form content, you need to know where to upload it. Here are some of the best platforms to upload those short-form videos and start to gain more followers, clients, listeners and fans.
TikTok
TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video and their audience can’t get enough of it. The platform associated with popularizing short-form content hosts 1 billion monthly active users on its platform, which is 1/8th of the world’s population. These users consume 1 million videos on the app every day, with Android users spending an average of 82 minutes per day on the app, giving you plenty of opportunity to get your brand in front of a lot of people.
Instagram Reels
Also with its very own user base of 1 billion active monthly users, Instagram Reels is a huge opportunity for you to add to your 2024 social media content strategy. Instagram gives Reels huge benefits for using short-form media. Among those benefits, Reels are eligible for recommendation to your non-following and also allow you opportunity for monetization. Potential clients can discover your Reels content through Instagram’s Explore feed, for the ultimate discovery boost.
YouTube Shorts
With a whopping 2 billion monthly users, not to be overlooked is video media giant, YouTube’s, Shorts. These vertical-focused (the orientation of your phone) clips of short-form content are helping uploaders grow their channels, fanbases and revenue streams much faster than its traditional monetization avenue with YouTube’s long-form content. The data shows that Shorts brings in organic subscribers who are engaged and supportive. So, if you’re a music artist, consider slicing your music videos into shorter segments that can be used as YouTube Shorts and link them back to your full video.
Read more about Youtube Shorts in my blog post. Or on YouTube’s Creators site.
My favorite resources to help you record short-form content
Canva
Around since 2013, “Canva is an online design and visual communication platform with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere“. With one of the biggest assortment of templates and elements to choose from, Canva has always been a leader when it comes to graphic design. They were one of the first and best platforms that enabled starting content creators and marketers the opportunity to create designs without the need to shell out hundreds of dollars on Adobe’s apps and without the monumental learning curve! This mission to empower creators has made Canva a favorite for not only new content creators, but also Fortune 500 companies like Sony, Zoom, and Bloomingdale’s trust Canva for their design and communications needs.
Capcut
Seen a green screen that made you LOL? That was made in Capcut! The video editing software and app, owned by the parent company of TikTok, burst on the scene in April 2020 and has had a chokehold on content creators and marketers since. Their templates can be seen racking up views all across social media. Capcut has a slew of elements, fonts, filters, effects and animations to choose from, even at the free level. This accessibility has enabled creators more access to tools that were otherwise out of reach due to the cost of robust editing software, allowing Capcut users to create some of the best templates and effects to use on just about every platform.
Edit your videos with Capcut here!
Veed
VEED is another powerful online video editing platform that offers a range of tools and features to help businesses create professional-looking videos quickly and easily. You can even use the program to download watermark-free Instagram & TikTok videos! With its intuitive AI and advanced editing capabilities, VEED has everything you need.
Riverside FM
Riverside is a virtual studio that makes recording and editing at the highest quality possible, accessible to anyone. Riverside is designed for everyone from podcasters to large companies. Its video conferencing has been used by some of the biggest names across several fields.
Level UP with Short-Form
As attention spans dwindle and competition intensifies, short-form content proves to be a powerful tool to achieve your social media goals. The benefits are clear – from the potential to go viral and reach a vast audience on platforms like TikTok, to the shareability and preference for short-form content expressed by social media consumers.
Embracing short-form content not only aligns with current trends but also positions you to thrive in a space where creativity, engagement, and brand loyalty intertwine. So, seize the opportunity, leverage these platforms and craft your compelling short-form content to leave a lasting impression on your audience and Level UP in 2024 and beyond!
