“Sociable” is the newest commentary on necessary social media developments and developments from business professional Andrew Hutchinson of Social Media As we speak.
There’s been an fascinating shift in video consumption of late, which may affect your video technique: Longer brief movies are actually seemingly gaining extra traction with audiences.
So by “longer brief” movies, we’re not speaking a couple of shift again to long-form content material of 5 minutes or extra. However what’s seemingly taking place, primarily based on the bulletins from every app, is that customers are actually extra prepared to interact with 3-minute-long movies, versus 30-second uploads.
In January, Instagram prolonged Reels to three minutes, after beforehand reporting that movies longer than 90 seconds didn’t carry out as properly, whereas YouTube has additionally made 3-minute-long clips eligible for the Shorts feed.
60-90 seconds was the candy spot, however now, the platforms are shifting to barely longer clips, with a view to encouraging extra engagement.
And the identical is now evident on TikTok as properly, as demonstrated in Buffer’s newest analysis report, which appears to be like at TikTok viewing developments, primarily based on evaluation of 1.1 million TikTok clips.
As per Buffer:
“TikTok movies which might be longer than one minute get 63.8% extra watch time than movies within the 30-60 second vary.”
As you’ll be able to see on this chart, longer movies get extra attain, by an enormous margin, although Buffer’s knowledge doesn’t specify a video size past one minute.
The identical goes for watch time, with longer movies driving extra engagement.

That then sends a optimistic sign to TikTok’s algorithm that that is related and interesting content material, which seemingly influences the primary chart above as properly.
So, primarily, TikTok’s seeing the identical shift as different platforms, in longer brief movies getting extra consideration. Once more, this doesn’t imply that you have to be trying to publish long-form epics to the app (TikTok’s add restrict is 10 minutes), however it could provide you with some further meals for thought with reference to what’s driving engagement, and how one can maximize your video efforts.
You possibly can learn Buffer’s full examine report right here.