Short-form content has begun to dominate the feeds of most social media platforms. Although people are using social media more, they’re spending less time engaging with individual posts. According to a study from Microsoft, people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds, highlighting the effects of an increasingly digitalized lifestyle on the brain.

Social media sites are adjusting to this by increasingly offering bite-sized content options such as short-form videos and ephemeral (disappearing) content. For example, Tik Tok is a social media platform dedicated to short-form videos. In the first three months of 2020, Tik Tok was downloaded 315 million times, setting a record for quarterly downloads by any app. To compete, Instagram launched Instagram Reels in 2020. Reels lets users record and post videos up to 30 seconds in length. This new video feature is in addition to Instagram’s two other video options, IGTV, and Stories.

According to one study by Cisco, it’s likely that 82% of online content will consist of videos by 2022. Here is our recommendation. When promoting your products or services through video advertising, keep it short and make it sweet!