With increasing volumes of videos battling for our attention and user attention spans shortening, what can brands do to retain engagement? Welcome to the year of short video marketing. Today’s audience doesn’t have the time or the focus to sit through lengthy videos, and instead are favouring short video content. What do we mean by short videos? We’re talking about videos that fall in the 1-minute and under category. That’s Stories on Facebook and Instagram, TikToks and Instagram Reels. Let’s look at some best marketing practices and the brands acing short videos.

What Video Length Works On Each Channel?

Over the past year, the main platforms have been experimenting with short video formats with Instagram Stories and TikTok videos increasing from their original 15 second length. Twitter shut down Fleets due to lack of popularity and LinkedIn shut down their own version of Stories for the same reason. So, what are we left with? These are the main channels for short videos and the length of video you can upload.

- Facebook Stories 120 Seconds

- Instagram Stories 60 Seconds

- Instagram Reels 60 seconds

- TikTok Videos 15 seconds, 30 seconds or 3 minutes

So, which brands are acing short videos on the platforms?

#1 Who’s Acing Facebook Stories?

Did you know that 500 million people use Facebook Stories daily? Or that 58% of users visit a brand’s website after seeing a business Story. 50% of them do so to buy a specific product? 72% of people agree that Stories enable them to experience new things outside their everyday lives. So, isn’t creating short-form video for this channel a complete no-brainer? Absolutely. And many brands are doing just that.

One company using Stories to their advantage is affordable home décor company Woven Nook. This brand regularly uses the Stories feature to ask their followers questions. This not only encourages interaction and boosts engagement, but it’s also a clever consumer research technique that can facilitate the expansion or improvement of services.

You can also make this type of Story work harder by using it to create further content. For example, reposting the answers to your original question with follower mentions is a great way to build that all-important B2C relationship. You can also showcase your product range in a way that directly relates to the wants and needs of your audience. Dogs and cats pretty much hit the mark most times!

Facebook Stories is also an excellent way to share any kind of corporate responsibility. Considering nearly 75% of today’s consumers expect brands to give back in some kind of way, this is not a bad thing to schedule into your content creation campaign.

A great example is The Body Shop. They teamed up with charity partner Bloody Good Period to encourage people to not only donate sanitary products in-store but to make a financial contribution too in a bid to make period products accessible to all. Their success was then communicated through Facebook Stories by a charity representative for increased authenticity.

Avoid being overly self-promotional by sharing positive third-party comments about your brand. This comes across as more genuine. Other ways to do this include reposting reward videos or asking consumers to create video reviews.

#2 Which Videos Are Killing It On Instagram Stories?

Instagram is celebrating its 12th birthday in 2022 and the platform has come on leaps and bounds since it first started as a picture sharing channel. Today it’s hugely influential in the successful marketing of products and services, with Instagram Stories having real sticking power. 58% of users say they’re more interested in a brand after seeing it in a Story. And with 9 out of 10 Instagram users watching video on the platform weekly, there’s a huge demand for short video content.

Which brands are killing it on Instagram Stories?

Emirates is one of the most active airlines on Instagram offering Stories packed with exciting destination information, Covid-safety updates, event information and more. Recently, the brand has been promoting exclusive merchandise for the EXPO 2020 Dubai which takes place until March 2022. This makes perfect sense considering Dubai is the airline’s base and the EXPO is undoubtedly a big pull for professionals.

Each EXPO story contains a ‘Tap to Buy’ link which takes consumers straight to the Emirates store. From there, merchandise can be bought instantly, making the sales process smooth.

Include shoppable links in your Instagram Stories as well as shoppable Instagram Stories stickers. The latter make it easy for businesses to tag physical products from their inventory or e-commerce platform and consumers can see essential purchasing information such as the item price.

Another great way to use Instagram Stories is by sharing user-generated content (UGC). This helps to promote your brand organically and saves you a whole load of content creation. By tagging influencers or big brands using your services, you can also boost the credibility of your business. Here’s an example from Pizza Pilgrims.

Use social media monitoring tools to track brand mentions, comments and hashtags on Instagram. This will help you to spot posts that you can reshare. At Moondust Agency we utilise a range of tools that make it easy for us to monitor essential topics, trends and social profiles based on keywords, hashtags, locations and specific users. Social listening tools also take things one step further by helping us to pick up on conversations that might not involve a specific tag and monitor brand sentiment.

#3 Which Brands Are Nailing Instagram Reels?

Instagram Reels is a relatively new Instagram content format that allows users to create and post short-form video content. It was inspired by the popularity of TikTok and what’s great about Reels is they can feature on the Explore page, where 50% of Instagram users discover new content. Both Instagram app downloads and time spent on the app have increased since the rollout of Reels and with brands such as Nike averaging a whopping 4.6 million views per Reel, a strategy involving Reels is worth considering. Let’s look at what Nike is getting right.

They’re actively championing collaborations with well-known sportsmen and women. Such partnerships are relevant, on-brand and help Nike to tap into the followers of each celebrity. The Reels content they share regularly focusses on the progressive nature of the brand and shows the direction they’re moving in. This ensures Nike is seen as fresh, innovative and forward-thinking.

Collaborative efforts must make sense. Don’t just pick influencers out of thin air. Make sure their values are in-line with yours and that their audience base will be interested in what you have to offer. Also, peek at their engagement levels. Often, it’s much better to work with micro influencers who have niche followers and high engagement levels than those who have a million+ fans. This is because they’re more likely to be genuinely interested in what you have to offer and will take time to create personalised content.

Instagram Reels – Must Dos…

- Create captions that are short and sweet. These capture attention straight away. In contrast, captions that cover the entire screen fail to grab attention.

- Most Instagram Reels are watched with the sound off, so always include on-screen text to ensure they can be watched in any kind of environment.

- The Reels feature comes with a built-in video alignment tool to align your clips with ease. Once you have recorded the video, tap on the video alignment button.

#4 Who’s Top For TikTok Videos?

TikTok has over 1 billion active users every month. It’s also available in 150 countries and with 167 million TikTok videos watched in just one internet minute, it’s clear there’s huge demand for this kind of content. More and more brands have joined this social media sensation over the past few years. So, who’s nailing it in 2022?

It’s not unusual for the world’s number one language app Duolingo to get over a million likes for each video and thousands upon thousands of comments. Their green owl mascot features heavily in the content and is often seen doing a host of weird and wonderful things, including practicing pickup lines in different languages. Considering TikTok is hugely popular with a younger audience, with almost half of all users being under 30, it makes complete sense to produce fun, energetic and quirky content.

Be socially aware and know exactly what’s hot and what’s not on the channel. TikTok is well-known for its trends. And if you can tap into these successfully with your own ideas, you could see huge engagement. Check out Duolingo’s version of the viral Celine Dion Challenge which encouraged users to give a dramatic performance of her hit ‘It’s All Coming Back to me Now.’ Don’t forget the right hashtags to make your content relevant and if you include some kind of influencer collaboration, even better.

Remember that you should have a different strategy for each of your channels and videos that work on Facebook might not work on TikTok. Additionally, there will be a different audience on each channel so it’s a great opportunity to try different approaches.

Marks & Spencer, a normally corporate and professional retail brand takes a completely quirky approach on TikTok. Utilising Percy Pig (from their confectionary range) they re-enact funny scenarios and relatable sketches that would appeal to a younger audience. And they retain their older audience with more traditional content on Facebook, so nobody loses out.

The Year Of Short Video Marketing – Which Brands Are Acing It?