YouTube Shorts 101
YouTube Shorts, the platform’s short-form video offering, has been growing recently, with employees themselves speaking to how it can be incorporated into social media strategies. It’s now the fastest-growing content type on YouTube (yes, over the traditional long-form content!), earning over 50 billion daily views.
Shorts spent a while in beta testing before being properly implemented, however, in Twitter posts shared by YouTube team members (the irony is not lost here), they have shared promising insights into how the algorithm works and top tips on how to use it.
If you’re already including an Instagram and/or TikTok strategy, it could be easy enough to use the same content optimised for the YouTube Shorts placement.
The algorithm: YouTube employee, Todd Sherman clarified that they “very deliberately [separate] short-form recommendations from long-form recommendations” so recommendations for long-form and short-form aren’t reliant on one another, allowing both to achieve the optimum level of success.
Another tip? “Think audience, not algorithm.” The behaviour of those actively choosing regular YouTube videos (i.e. people know what they want to watch), versus those scrolling through Shorts and being served suggested content is different, so the respective algorithms are. They’re not to be thought of as one and the same.
Length matters: Analysis of 3.3 billion Shorts views hint at some of the signals that matter for Shorts. One of them is video length. The graphs show the distribution by video length with most shorts between 20 and 40 seconds. It’s also clear that longer length Shorts appear to be significantly outperformed, particularly those 50-60 seconds long.
Despite TikTok and Instagram extending the length of their short-form video formats, YouTube has stated that they will not be doing so for the time being, and maximum length will be kept at 60 seconds. This makes sense considering they’ve owned the long-form video format for years.
Data from a YouTube Shorts study run by analysts at YouTube.
Shorts for growth: “We’ve actually done some analyses recently where we looked at audience growth for [YouTube] channels that only made long-form videos, and channels that made both long-form and Shorts videos. The channels that made Shorts actually seem to be growing faster,” YouTube product manager, Pierce Vollucci said.
Having said that, Sherman suggests a “fewer, bigger, better” approach. YouTube is first and foremost a platform that encourages video production, and it seems the low-fi trend that dominates Instagram and TikTok may not apply in some cases for Shorts. Ensuring the content is hi-res either way looks to be a key tip.
Objective and strategy: Brands can use Shorts in a number of ways, but they need to have a clear objective. Are you looking at Shorts as a way to drive discovery towards your long-form content? The power is in discovery. Or, do you want to use Shorts as a way to grow a new audience, or to experiment with new content types? The opportunities are there and Shorts can easily fit into the broader content strategy, especially if you are already creating short-form content for Instagram and/or TikTok. And since YouTube’s algorithm doesn’t punish accounts if Shorts underperform, there’s no risk involved.
Measuring success: YouTube isn’t releasing their Shorts engagement measurements as they want to ensure creators and brands are receiving authentic engagement results. On Instagram and TikTok, a view is counted as soon as a video comes onto the screen. With Shorts, it seems the views metric is measured by intent “so that creators feel like that view has some meaningful threshold that the person decided to watch”, according to Sherman.
Hashtags: There isn’t a definitive answer on whether hashtags provide any benefit when sharing YouTube Shorts, however, attaching trending moments and niche topics to content could help people discover your channel when used sparingly.
We’re really interested in the progression of Shorts in the mix with Instagram Reels and TikTok, and will definitely seek new updates and insights on YouTube Shorts as they arise.
Sources: Social Media Today; The Leap