There’s been an attention-grabbing shift in video consumption of late, which might 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 few shift again to long-form content material of 5 minutes or extra. However what’s seemingly taking place, based mostly on the bulletins from every app, is that buyers are actually extra keen 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 effectively, 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 effectively, as demonstrated in Buffer’s newest analysis report, which appears at TikTok viewing traits, based mostly 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 possibly can 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 constructive sign to TikTok’s algorithm that that is related and fascinating content material, which doubtless influences the primary chart above as effectively.
So, basically, TikTok’s seeing the identical shift as different platforms, in longer brief movies getting extra consideration. Once more, this doesn’t imply that try to be seeking to publish long-form epics to the app (TikTok’s add restrict is 10 minutes), however it might offer you some further meals for thought with regard to what’s driving engagement, and how one can maximize your video efforts.
You possibly can learn Buffer’s full research report right here.