When crafting your next social media post, it’s essential to consider factors that will resonate with your audience. Different industries and audiences have varying preferences for content length. Generally, audiences lean towards either short-form or long-form content. Long-form content typically exceeds 900 words or three minutes in video length, while short-form content is under 900 words or three minutes long. Let’s discuss the benefits of utilizing both forms of content.
Long Form Content:
Building a Rapport
Building rapport with your audience is crucial for any business. It boosts your credibility and deepens your audience’s connection with your brand. This, in turn, allows you to better understand their preferences and deliver content that truly resonates with them.
Allotting Time to Weave Together a Great Story
Long-form content allows creators to craft a compelling story in detail. By investing time in a well-developed narrative, you can capture your audience’s interest. For example, longer videos enable your company to share its story, values and client relationships, helping to reach diverse audiences and provide a deeper insight into your business.
Allows More Keywords to be Used for SEO
Long-form content is usually very detailed and includes more thorough information and examples, providing more opportunities in searches for keywords to come up in searches. Typically, long-form content also cites other third-party resources and studies that allow visitors to deep dive into a specific subtopic. From that, it ranks for more keywords for SEO, therefore your content would be more discoverable.
Short Form Content:
Shorter Attention Spans
In recent years, attention spans have increasingly diminished. The national average attention span is 8.25 seconds, which explains why sometimes short form content is more desirable. Do you ever find yourself skipping over longer videos after a day of work because you don’t want to sit through a five-minute video? Exactly. We’ve all done it, and we will continue to do so, if our attention spans continue the trend of declining as they have been for the past several years.
Easier to Consume
Long videos can be divided into shorter segments to make them more digestible for audiences. For the trades, using brief product videos and testimonials can maintain or increase engagement. Also, creating suspense—such as teasing a product launch and following up with more details later—can keep your audience eagerly anticipating more. Highlighting key features and benefits of products in short videos or articles is another effective way to generate buzz and engage your audience.
Statistically Speaking…
According to Wired, it was found that “On platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels use videos that are often less than 30 seconds in length,” and “50 percent of TikTok users say videos longer than 60 seconds are ‘stressful’.” This statistic is incredible insightful to deciding whether or not short form content is appropriate for the type of content that you put out for your audience. It’s also important to judge your audience in order to see what kind of content they would prefer.
Overall, there are great benefits to using both long form and short form content. It’s important to weigh which type of content would benefit you and engage your audience more. This, in turn, allows your audience to see the content that is important and interesting to them. For most companies, it would most likely be in favor of them to generate a mix of long form and short form content, in order to maximize the marketing efforts that are put out. When utilizing either type of content, as long as you understand what your audience would want, from there your content will be able to thrive.
