Videos are one of the key tools in promoting the products and services that your business offers on the market. Today we live in a world where it is relatively easy for business owners to make a video showing the quality of the products and services they offer to the general public.
Perhaps you are one of those business owners who have opened profiles on popular social networks for the very purpose of promoting your products and services to Internet users. In order to do this you can and should use several types of videos (something we wrote about in the last two blogs).
But to be successfully accepted by social media users, your videos need to follow some standards. In addition to the quality of the recordings, one of the most important aspects that you should pay attention to is the duration of the videos.
For the duration of videos posted on social media, the rules "the shorter - the better" and "quality is more important than quantity" apply in most cases. In other words, it means that in the context of the internet world and social media, what is important is to have quality but short and on the point videos. This is so because the attention span of social media users is not very long.
In this and the next blog we will write about how long your social media videos should be. Every popular social media platform has its own rules about how long the videos you post can be. But, according to the latest research, each internet social platform has an optimal (best and most effective) video length that should be observed if you want to reach its users.
YOUTUBE
For many years, YouTube has been the most visited video platform in the Internet world. Not only that, but it is also the second largest search engine on the internet (right behind Google). In other words, it means that if an Internet user needs information about anything, they will first seek help from Google and then from YouTube.
This is exactly one of the reasons why you should seriously consider starting your own YouTube channel for your business or organization. YouTube is a free platform where you can publish your products/services/messages to the general public, and if you have the budget, you can also advertise them.
But the question in the context of the main topic of this blog is: how long should your YouTube videos be in order to be acceptable to the majority of the audience that uses this Internet platform? The answer may depend on what type of video you want to post, but there are some general rules.
As with many other platforms, YouTube offers you the option to post long videos (up to 12 hours!). But according to some marketing experts, it's a good idea to stick to somewhere between two and three minutes for most videos. As with other platforms, the reason for this is the attention span of the users.
But depending on the type of video, you won't go wrong if you post videos that are around 10 minutes long. However, if you have a message you want to convey, try to do it in 2-3 minutes, because YouTube users will more easily decide to give you 2-3 than 10 minutes of their time.
Although it is a platform that is mostly used for sharing text, sharing images and videos on Twitter is also very popular. The important thing to keep in mind is that compared to other popular platforms we've talked about in this blog, Twitter has much tighter limits on how long you can share.
Currently, the video limit on Twitter is 2 minutes and 20 seconds. But according to some marketing experts, when posting videos on Twitter, it's best to keep them shorter than a minute. In particular, marketing experts from Vimeo, Influencer Marketing Hub and Hurrdat Marketing recommend that your Twitter videos be between 43 and 45 seconds.
If you can get your message across in such a short period of time - do it! But if you need to post a longer video, you can still use Twitter to post a shorter version that would be a sort of teaser for the longer video. Of course, in such conditions you will also need to provide a link to the original (longer) video.
TIKTOK
Undoubtedly, TikTok is the fastest growing video sharing platform in the last few years. A growing number of young people are creating profiles on TikTok, which means that if you have a product or service (or a message) that you want to introduce to a young audience - you need to sit down and make a strategy for using TikTok.
One of the main features of TikTok is that the videos shared are relatively short. The platform is designed in such a way that its users can receive as much information as possible, from as many sources as possible, in a relatively short time. In other words, TikTok as a platform is designed to be a place for sharing short videos.
Although the duration limit of TikTok videos can be up to 10 minutes, hardly anyone would recommend you to go to that limit. According to Vimeo experts, TikTok videos should be around 9-15 seconds in length.
If you want your TikTok videos to be watched, you need to make the first few seconds of your videos very attractive. In a way, the first 3 seconds of your video is are the hook for the viewers. If that part of the videos is not interesting - you will surely lose the audience you want to reach.
CONCLUSION
The fact that videos on some of these platforms need to be short (if you want them to be watched) isn't something that should scare you. On the contrary, this should stimulate your creativity and encourage you to pay attention to the quality of the videos (content) and not to their quantity (length).
Another very important tip: when creating videos for social media, do it in a way that media users can understand your message visually. Sometimes they find themselves in situations and circumstances where it is not appropriate to use headphones or turn up the volume on their phones. Therefore, your message should be clear not only from listening to the audio, but also from just watching the video you post.
tags