Why Use Short Videos for Marketing? | Part 3: Short-Form Video Content

Why use short videos for marketing?

Well, for starters, they are the best-performing content type on many social media platforms!

For example in this study done by Hootsuite, their Short-Form Videos performed 3 to 4 times better than their other videos.

What Is Short-Form Video Content?

Short-Form Video Content is between 5 and 60 seconds short, they are recorded vertically, usually with a smartphone, and are uploaded to platforms like:

• TikTok,
• Instagram Reels,
• Facebook Watch, or
• YouTube Shorts

But if Short-Form Videos perform the best, then why aren’t we only creating short videos?

On social media, performance is measured by views, likes, comments, shares, and follows. In other words, the faster you grow your social media account, the better the performance.

And Short-Form Video Content is really, really good at doing that.

However, Short-Form Videos are not very good at selling.

And so you have to ask yourself for each video:

• Am I creating this video to grow my social media account?
• Or am I creating this video to sell something?

If you’re creating videos to grow your social media audience, then you wanna get good at creating short videos.

So here are my 5 beginner tips to start making amazing Short-Form Videos.

5 Tips for Creating Short-Form Videos Content

Tip 1: Having an Impeccable Audio Quality

When people watch Short-Form Videos, all it takes is one quick swipe to skip your video.

Bad audio quality is almost guaranteed to make people swipe next.

So here’s the first tip, do a quick test recording first. Listen to it with your headphones to check the audio quality.

You might find it beneficial to consider investing in a Lavalier microphone, such as the one shown here. It can greatly enhance the audio quality and ensure clear sound capture for various purposes.

Tip 2: Skipping the Introduction

As mentioned earlier, Short-Form Videos are between 5 and 60 seconds only so it might help to skip the introduction. Instead have a super enticing hook by going straight for the main reason of your videos. Dive straight into the core content, maximizing the time available to go into the main points or discussions.

For example, if you’re giving a piece of diet advice, don’t say something like this:

“Hi, my name is Morris, I’m a diet coach from Montreal, and in this video, I will X…”

Instead, try saying something like this:

“One apple per day reduces your risk of X illness.”

The second script completely skipped the introduction and got straight to the most interesting part. 

Tip 3: Adding Captions

If you are doing talking-head videos like I’m doing, then adding captions almost always increases the average view duration. Especially when you can animate or even color the captions a bit.

Adding captions requires some video editing skills but some editing applications can make it a simple task, ensuring seamless integration of captions into the video.

I like using CapCut. It’s free and very accessible. I can use it directly on my phone, and it even auto-generates my captions. You wanna give it a try?

Tip 4: Post Consistently

This is the hardest thing to do: Staying consistent.

You want to upload at least 2 Short-Form Videos per week. Considering each video is under 60 seconds, that should be totally doable.

However, you will get much better results when you can upload 5 short videos per week, so almost 1 every day, with 2 days off per week.

Remember that not every video needs to be 60 seconds long, they can be 10 seconds, 15 seconds, or 20 seconds short, as a matter of fact, I encourage you to keep them as short as possible.

These types of videos don’t last for very long on the platform. When you consistently post short-form videos, generally 2 to 5 times every single week, your social media account where you post them can give you a chance of gaining more viewer traction.

Tip 5: Use Cross-Platform Tactics

After investing your time and effort in creating a single short video, it is essential to maximize its reach by sharing it across various platforms. By distributing your video content on multiple platforms, you increase the likelihood of reaching a diverse and wider audience.

Upload all your videos to:

• Instagram as Reels,
• Facebook on their Watch feed,
• YouTube as Shorts,
• And of course on TikTok

Selective Focus Photography of Person Holding Turned on Smartphone by Lisa Fotios on Canva.com

Once you have created one Short-Form Video, there are so many ways to leverage that and create a lot more content with very little effort. Here are additional ideas you can consider:

• If you have a Facebook group, also upload it to your group
• You can even take the text from your short video, and turn it into a tweet – or series of tweets on Twitter.
• You can also turn it into a blog post on your website
• Or take a photo of yourself, and take the video text to post it as the description of the taken photo

So for final words:

Growing your social media accounts, and gaining thousands of views and followers is great, but ultimately what you really want is to make sales.

Here’s an update regarding the Content Marketing Series I started.

1. Part 1: An Overview
2. Part 2: Written Content
3. Part 3: Short-From Video Content
4. Part 4: Long-Form Video Content (soon)
5. Part 5: Podcasting (soon)
6. Part 6: The Conclusion (soon)

Among the tips that I shared above, which one is your favorite? Or perhaps, you have any tricks you can add? Share them down on the comment section. I want to read the all.

And don’t forget to subscribe on my YouTube channel, @creategrowprofit.