TikTok Launches 10 Minute Long Videos
Content plays a major part in many businesses marketing strategies. You may have heard the saying ‘content is king’. Well, this is certainly true for businesses that want to engage, educate and entertain their audience on subjects surrounding their products and services.
TikTok has become one of the biggest social platforms, making it a great way for businesses to reach their customers with their content. In fact, TikTok was the most downloaded app in 2021 and is now the 6th most used social media platform.
In this article, we take a look at one of the latest updates from TikTok and what this could mean for the businesses that use it.
Short-Form Content
TikTok’s explosive growth is likely due to the super-engaging short-form content it hosts. These short hits of entertainment have proven popular, tapping into social media users’ ever-shortening attention spans and desire for quick to consume content.
Did you know that a massive 66% of video ads are less than 30 seconds long? This just goes to show that short videos are great for engaging an audience.
Short-form content has proven so popular in fact that other leading social platforms have followed suit such as Instagram’s ‘Reels’ and YouTube’s recent roll-out ‘Shorts’.
When TikTok initially launched in 2016 it offered users just one short video length to choose from – 15 seconds. These short vids are what the app became known for. However, as the app has grown in popularity it has increased its video length offering. Firstly, TikTok fairly quickly increased the video length to 60 seconds after launch. More recently, in 2021, it increased the length again to a total of 3 minutes.
Then, in February of this year, TikTok made an interesting and widely unpredicted update to video length…
10 Minute Videos on TikTok
For a social media platform that found its popularity in super-short video clips, the drastic increase of video time allowance may come as a bit of a shock. However, scratch the surface and it is easy to see why the company made this decision.
Firstly, TikTok’s goal is to get people to spend more time on the app. Although the app in its past form was arguably addictive in nature, it was easy to watch just a few short videos before navigating away to do something else. Increasing the duration of videos to 10-minutes offers a potential for the app to increase the time that users watch videos, therefore increasing the time they spend on the app.
Longer videos also offer TikTok something very valuable – revenue. Not only do longer videos increase the time that users spend on the app, increasing the time they can be advertised to, they are also easier to split – providing more opportunity to serve adverts.
For example, with a 15-second video, your only opportunity to serve an ad is at the beginning, as serving an ad in the middle would be unnatural and frustrating. With a 10 minute video, there are ample opportunities for TikTok to insert ads throughout the video, increasing revenue potential.
Longer videos will also help the app increase its appeal to a wider audience, allowing it to target those who have ‘more to say’ on particular topics.
What Does This Update Mean for Businesses?
So, longer ads are better for TikTok…but is it better for the businesses that use it?
The obvious benefit of this update is the fact that it will eventually increase the ‘advertising real estate’ of the platforms, making it is easier and possibly cheaper to reach your audience there. The update will also allow businesses to deliver more detailed content, which would be especially beneficial for businesses that want to educate their customers.
TikTok 10 Min Videos: Summary
On the face of it, TikTok’s decision to increase video times to 10 minutes seems a strange one. However, once you consider the fact that this could massively increase the revenue potential of the app it becomes clear why they have made this move.
Businesses can also find opportunities in this update, both through advertising and via reaching their TikTok audience with longer-form content.