A Guide to Short-form Video Content
Short-form video has rapidly become a major part of video marketing for numerous brands and organisations around the world. Here’s our backgrounder on short-form video: what it is, where it came from, the pros, and the cons.
What is short-form video?
There is no fixed definition for what constitutes short-form video, but as the name suggests, length is an important factor. The general consensus is that videos up to 90 seconds long can be described as short-form video content. Short-form video is also inextricably linked to the huge growth in video consumption on social media platforms, especially TikTok and Instagram.
The rise of short-form video
Most people credit TikTok as the birthplace of short-form video. And while it’s still perhaps best-known for unleashing viral dance videos on the world, few could have predicted the enormous (and seemingly permanent) shift that TikTok would spark in online video production when the platform launched in 2016.
But there were others that came before it. In 2012, Snapchat started allowing users to record short videos that could be sent privately as messages. Then came Vine, the first platform explicitly built around users creating and sharing public short-form video content. Vine rapidly became one of the fastest-growing social media platforms in the world, but was ultimately outpaced by the competition and closed down in 2017.
Today, almost all of the major social media platforms have a dedicated offering for short-form video: Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are both established and hugely popular, and more recently, LinkedIn has started rolling out a dedicated in-app feed for short-form video.
It’s also worth mentioning that much of this would not have been possible without the enormous advances in mobile phone technology over the past decade, and mobile phone screens are now the main place that short-form video content is seen.
Why are short-form videos so popular?
Short-form video has seen sustained growth for some time now, and there’s no sign of that slowing down anytime soon. Pinpointing exactly why is a little harder to do, but here are some considerations that play a part.
For marketers, one obvious part of the appeal of short-form video is the potential for enormous brand exposure on social platforms when the algorithm decides to get behind your video and push it out to huge (cold) audiences. Almost every brief we receive now involves at least some short-form deliverables for use on social media platforms.
But social platforms are also intensely competitive when it comes to capturing the attention of a viewer, and so videos that don’t get to the point quickly are unlikely to stop people scrolling on to the next piece of content. This has led to a real focus on hooks in short-form video, which often sees the traditional storytelling arc turned on its head: videos often start with the most exciting part of the story in an effort to keep people watching.
However, it’s important to note that this shift to short-form video is a phenomenon largely confined to particular social platforms and some marketing campaigns. YouTube and on-demand streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ still draw huge market share for longer-form video.
What are the disadvantages of short form video?
One of the first things people discover when they start to create short-form video content is that shorter does not mean easier, and in fact producing bite-size content creates a new set of challenges:
Limited depth: Because you have only a short amount of your viewer’s time, topics that are more complex or have nuance can be difficult to translate into effective short-form content.
The quality of engagement: Though you can often achieve good initial engagement with short-form content, developing more sustained brand affinity is more difficult to do in such a constrained format.
Brand messaging: Again, because of the limited time you have to work with, communicating cohesive brand messaging can become more of a challenge in short-form content.
How long should short-form videos be?
The trend in short-form and social media video has been towards making videos shorter and shorter. Data from Hootsuite showed that the average length for videos posted to Facebook in 2024 was 10-15 seconds, and the same statistic for Instagram and X was just 5-10 seconds. LinkedIn, which is perhaps better suited to B2B brands, came in slightly longer at 30-60 seconds.
The length of your video should be dictated by the material you have to work with and the platform you’re going to share it on. If you’ve got something really compelling, then you may be able to keep viewers engaged for longer, delivering better results.
Data from Tubular labs showed that while videos under 30 seconds long had the most uploads to TikTok in 2023, longer videos actually won the highest average views per video. Traditionally short-form channels are welcoming – and often rewarding – longer pieces of content, so we’d recommend experimenting with longer videos too.
