MANILA, PHILIPPINES — Short-form videos have taken the online space by storm and people are going to YouTube Shorts to create and watch content. With the myriad of brand opportunities that it presents, here are some ways marketers can maximize the format and create engaging Shorts content:
Play your greatest hits
Take your best videos and reupload them as YouTube Shorts. Or edit them to give the video a new twist. Shorts give you the opportunity to reach more viewers and gain a new following. Brands can also shorten their long-form content into snappy, attention-grabbing Shorts.
Provide pure entertainment
There’s a reason stand-up comedians are now parsing their acts into short clips — often one sketch or joke at a time — and sharing them online. It’s because we all love punchlines, funny animals, pranks, parodies, cuteness and everything else that makes us smile or laugh.
Show quick hacks
Who doesn’t want to know how to fix a continuous flushing toilet, or make your cherry tomatoes last longer, or remove acid rain marks on your windshield? At some point in our lives, we’ve all turned to YouTube to know how to fix something — but we get bored at content creators that stretch their videos unnecessarily. With Shorts, you can create hacks that are quick, visual, and effective as people love to see quick solutions.
Hit viewers with amazing facts
Hit them with entertaining facts with your on-screen persona. As a content creator and a consumer yourself, you know that people lie awake at night because of an unanswered question on their mind. When is the best time to go to Italy? What does a harvest moon look like? What, really, is the theory of relativity? Brands can also position themselves as a source of interesting facts and as thought leaders with creative shorts.
Teach useful skills
People want to learn to do things from people who are doing them. It can be as simple as how to pronounce words, apply winged eyeliner or how to dance in clubs or to have that perfect golf swing. The list is endless because people want to learn skills for everyday life and to give them professional advantage. Brands can encourage their followers by teaching them skills related to their product or use their partner creators to share their skills.
Tell a compelling story
It can take only 10 to 60 seconds to tell a compelling story and you will have fans for life. Creators can tell the story like many do — or show the story with a series of short clips. Focus on emotion, drama or humor. Use a full range of visual cues, edits and matching audio. Brands can tell their story with their partner creators or ordinary people’s interactions with their brand. Another way is to take viewers behind the story — we all love BTS content.
Conduct experiments
Experiments, whether scientific or not, are fun videos to watch because you never know what’s going to happen at the end. Help people see common things in new and intriguing ways. Brands can do this by focusing on a cool feature of their product or doing a social experiment to see how users react to their service.
Do micro-reviews
We don’t have time to sit through a 30-minute review of a product, movie, series or service. Don’t worry about being comprehensive because viewers want just one question answered: is it good? Tell them what’s best (and not best), and it’s up to them to do deeper. Brands can create a remix or share highlights from UGC or creators reviewing and loving their products.
With all these quick and simple thought starters, creating your next few (or multiple) Shorts is now a matter of inspiration. If you’ve got an idea already, upload your Shorts on youtube.com or the YouTube app. As consistency is key, keep on experimenting and uploading content to learn and to be able to see what’s working.
