How Long Should Videos Be on Different Marketing Platforms?
When it comes to promoting your content on various social media sites – whether you’re advertising your business, marketing your film, or just posting personal content – it’s important to consider the attention span of your audience. Their interest in your video has to be instantly peaked, and retained throughout, or they’ll quickly scroll past.
So, what’s the optimal video length for different marketing or social media platforms? After all, we are much more prepared to commit to a minute-long video on Facebook than we are on Twitter or Instagram.
Luckily, expert video marketers on HubSpot have calculated the optimal video lengths on various platforms. With editing, animation, sound and visual effects, the best marketing video is one that engages the audience in a new and unexpected way, and timing is a crucial aspect of production.
Marketing Video Length To Keep Audience Attention
One of the most overruling pieces of data mentioned in the study is that viewers who watch the first 3 seconds of a video (across the internet) are more likely to finish it.
So, it’s important to prioritize the length of your videos on social media and make sure the audience is hooked from the first moment, regardless of whether or not they think they’re interested in your project or product.
Then, you have to make sure that every frame of your video is engaging and original. While this isn’t the easiest task, you’ll find that post-production editing and animation is key.
It’s as important with both short form videos and long form videos, to grab the audience’s interest and keep it throughout the story, with interesting visuals and important information. Even with platforms that only allow brief videos that provide the barest amount of information, every second should be used to provide eye-catching images and information, without worrying too much about fleshing out the video’s story.
Marketing Video Length for Different Social Platforms
YouTube
The best length for a YouTube video is around 2 minutes, following both the overall rule that most popular online videos are 2 minutes or under, and the fact that YouTube has the most engagement on videos about 2 minutes long.
However, YouTube is the one platform where you should be uploading your in-depth or long form videos, such as full-length commercials or trailers, tutorials, personal testimonials and interviews.
Since YouTube allows specific searches, your targeted audience should be able to enjoy more thorough content. It’s also helpful to treat YouTube as a catalogue of all your promotional videos, including the full-length versions of the short clips you may post on other social media.
By doing this, and organizing these videos into playlists, your audience can find exactly what they’re looking for and new viewers can also find your videos related to other content they’re interested in.
With advertisements or promotional videos on Facebook, whether you post them on your page or on Facebook stories, the best performers are under 2 minutes. After this audience engagement tends to drop off sharply – in fact, 56% of all marketing videos published in the last year are under 2 minutes long.
In order to keep attention, the best performing long form videos on Facebook are immediately informative and entertaining in their visuals, and can be easily understood without sound. This is because Facebook, as well as most of the platforms mentioned here, autoplay their videos without sound at first.
If you are posting your video to Facebook stories, it should be kept to under 30 seconds or split up into multiple story segments. Most stories are made up of photos rather than videos, much like Instagram.
Twitter is designed for a short attention span and even the doubled 280 character limit is considered too long. Twitter has a 140 second (or 2 minutes and 20 seconds) video length limit, but the best way to utilize video marketing is to promote your longer videos with short “preview” Twitter videos.
Twitter’s #videooftheday averages 43 seconds, so a 45 second video is the ideal video length. Remember, it’s important to keep your audience engaged from the second your video begins. Like a tweet, you should provide quick and impactful updates, similar to a headline.
Twitter videos are like teaser trailers for a more detailed advertisement or promotion. The longer version should be kept on Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook, and linked from the tweet.
Instagram offers unique opportunities and challenges for video creators. It’s the largest social media site for short-form videos, but there is added pressure to keep audience engagement with impressive visuals.
Although the upper limit for videos on Instagram is 60 seconds, 30 seconds may be the ideal vido length. The videos that receive the most comments typically average about 26 seconds.
So, you’ll need to create a strategy for which information to include on your feed, and which to put on IGTV, Reels or your Story. You can preview a longer video on your feed, while saving these Reels on your account for your fans to visit anytime. These videos can be clips up to 30 seconds, but you can put multiple clips on Reels.
As for IGTV and live videos, these can be up to 60 minutes, since they are created to be more in-depth and are specifically targeted to your followers. You can also save a live video to IGTV after its runtime, for your audience to enjoy later.
You can also make several permanent stories on your account, which cycle through short photos or clips (that provide important and interesting content and are specifically titled), so that your audience can easily find the information they need.
LinkedIn is an essential platform for business to business (B2B) communication and marketing, and is the ideal site to share your more detailed and technical videos.
Like YouTube or Facebook, LinkedIn is more amenable to longer videos that reach your targeted audience or followers. Your videos on LinkedIn are also kept on a homepage (similar to YouTube) so that your followers can access previous videos.
As LinkedIn videos can cover more professional and in-depth topics, they’re great for instructional and informative videos. These videos can explain your products and services in more detail, your company history and information, and the progress of your current work. And since these videos are B2B targeted, you can create these videos for an audience that knows your industry and is more committed to the subject matter.
The length of your video depends on whether you are posting one of these “native” LinkedIn videos to your page, or posting a video ad. Your LinkedIn videos can only be up to 10 minutes long, but video ads can run up to 30 minutes. LinkedIn also recommends specific ad targeting, but be careful not to narrow your audience too much.
As with all social media sites, brevity and visual interest is helpful for attracting new viewers. LinkedIn found that attention wanes after 10 seconds, and videos under 30 seconds experienced a 200% lift in view completion rates.
So, even though you can make longer videos, you should still consider the short attention span of your audience. And, just like Facebook, these videos should be easily comprehensible, even without sound, with subtitles and graphics to keep them interested in learning more.
Conclusion
In the data found by HubSpot, the ideal video length for each platform is defined by the average attention span, watch time, and engagement with video posts.
This is what makes post-production services like the ones we provide at Real Art Daily (RAD) Productions so helpful in making your videos a social media hit.