Both short and long-form videos have their importance in the digital space. For businesses, it is important to know when to use which type of content.
Every video has to be produced to engage the audience by providing them with something of value. The videos can be entertaining, engaging or educational.
As a business, you need to come out with a plan for your video creation and sharing. In this blog, we discuss various aspects of both short-form and long-form videos.
Short and long-form videos, both have their own importance. The debate is that which one is best for businesses. To uncover the answer, we must know the full details about both of them.
As a business, the main focus is on improving sales and therefore marketers make use of both short and long forms of content on a regular basis.
The world is better connected than ever before in history, and customers look for answers to their queries and questions on a daily basis. Considering from a business point of view, the video content must be produced to answer to provide answers to various customers.
Short form vs long form video
The attention spans of users or customers are getting shorter, and this has been proved by a study conducted by Microsoft Corp.
The research has highlighted that people start to lose their concentration after 8 seconds. In 2000, it was 12 seconds. This is a huge fall.
The reason behind this is that users are being loaded with video content on an everyday basis. The huge rise in smartphone usage is also one of the factors behind this trend.
As per Google, short-form videos are under 10 minutes and long-form videos are over 10 minutes. But this is not true for platforms like TikTok or Instagram Reels because there you see videos that are less than 30 seconds.
The users reported that videos longer than 60 seconds are stressful for them to watch. Therefore, the definition of video length varies on the platform you use and also the audience you are targeting.
When to produce long-form video?
If short-form videos are known to grab the attention of the users, the long-form videos create a way to hold the attention and thus develop lasting engagement.
As per the research done by Adweek, 80% of videos that are shorter than 5 minutes are known to drive less than a third of total engagement. The users also like long-form video content, especially when it comes to smartphone viewing.
Going live and doing broadcasts is one preferable way of creating long-form video content. The live broadcasts do well and drive social feeds. A useful tip is to record broadcasts and repurpose them after. Again, choosing a niche works out well as a strategy.
Pick a topic of your area of expertise. Also, you must be authoritative, entertaining, or educational. If possible, you can integrate all three features into your video.
The next strategy is to remain episodic which helps in growing interest and boosting engagement, for example a weekly review. You can also consider doing podcasting. Guest interviews are also a great idea to attract audience.
As a business, you should produce long-form video when:
● You need to drive organic traffic to a website,
● Increase inbound links, to rank higher in SERPs
● Increase conversions, for building authority on a specific subject
● And to keep your audience engaged.
The long-form video content should be produced to build trust with your online audience or customers. To develop such content, you need to research the topic, get all possible information regarding the topic and find someone who is an expert on the topic picked.
When to produce short-form video?
The short-form content is good to suffice for your business goals in many forms. You must produce short-form video content when you need to produce content in a short span of time.
Also, when you need to post a large amount of content for a fixed schedule. As a business, you must create a mobile-friendly website and be remembered by the audience.
The short-form video should also be produced when you need to be accessed by smartphone users and increase engagement. Again, when you need to communicate a simple idea, then short-form video content can be pretty useful.
Choosing short / long form video content for video marketing
There are many factors to consider when choosing the form of content that has to be used for online marketing strategy.
The best way to create amazing content is to take into account various factors such as customer interests, education of customers, user intent and journeys of the customers to reach specific pieces of content.
What are some reasons for using long-form video content? There are many answers to this question. The long-form of video content is exceptional for building relationships.
It is also great for SEO. It also helps you to leave a lasting impression. Also, it gives you space and time to form a good story.
Coming to short-form video content, helps in building awareness with the passage of time in lots of tiny steps. It is also well suited to social media. Another good thing about short-form video content is that they work well in ads.
There are some tips that can help you get the most out of your short-form videos.
You need to grab attention immediately, but keep it simple. Break the longer videos to get chunks of videos that can be used as short-form videos.
This means you need not always start from scratch. You also need to post at the best times. You can also outsource the work to a good video production company for the best results.
