As a content creator, you should always look at trends and find ways to incorporate those things into your YouTube channel and production.
You should examine all areas, from content production values to video length, to determine what best suits your content design and creation.
One area that is becoming extremely popular is short-form content, videos lasting up to 60 seconds.
The growth of short-form formats like TikTok and Instagram Reels has made the format an incredible opportunity to reach a broad audience with content that may otherwise not be exposed to your stuff.
To keep up with this popular trend and provide users and creators with new opportunities, YouTube has been rolling out its YouTube Shorts, a way for creators to make short-form videos for users to consume.
So, if you’re contemplating if the format is good for you, the uncertainty of whether the new format is worthwhile can be a bit much, so we at Raffiti Media put together this article about the pros & cons for you.
What Are YouTube Shorts?
Before you start anything, you should always understand the format and expectations to help guide you.
So, before answering the question, “Should I work in YouTube Shorts?” Let’s take a moment to understand the platform.
YouTube Shorts is a short-form video format that is less than a minute long and is filmed and uploaded from a smartphone using an app.
These videos are designed to be short, snappy, and engaging for quick consumption, similar to platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels.
These short videos are stored on the YouTube shelf so that users can discover them over time. Strategic content creators create these engaging videos and drive traffic to them, much like with their traditional YouTube channel.
In addition to being on the YouTube shelf, these shorter videos can also appear on the Shorts player through the YouTube app and the YouTube homepage.
Should I Do YouTube Shorts?
Okay, now that you understand that YouTube has invested itself in making the short format a cornerstone of its platform, let’s answer your question: ” Should I do YouTube Shorts?”
In short, pun intended, yes.
But it depends.
Understanding your target audience, their preferences for content consumption, your objectives, and your content strategy will determine whether this format is suitable for your goals. Still, creating and publishing this type of video has various benefits.
Understanding your audience goals and whether the format aligns with those metrics is essential to determine the proper format for you.
But before you decide, you need to understand the appeal of YouTube Shorts.
Understanding the Appeal of YouTube Shorts
In today’s online culture, there are more and more sources of content consumption, and users quickly scroll from one form to another with decreased attention spans. Rather than trying to swim upstream, a better strategy is to go with the flow and adopt what consumers want.
Because of the short-form popularity, let’s look at a few reasons why YouTube Shorts is quickly becoming so appealing as a format.
Quick Consumption
The format is designed to get in front of users primarily on their smartphones and to be quickly digested before they scroll to another short video or image.
The quick consumption model is the function, so don’t try to force a square peg into a round hole, but learn to embrace that for most users, especially younger ones, the quick consumption model is how they consume content.
There are a couple of reasons for this that include:
Scroll On Down: In today’s fast-paced, attention-demanding culture, people are constantly scrolling through social media feeds, making short-form videos the primary way they are being exposed and consuming content.
Attention Spans: Another reason is that users are becoming more conditioned to short content, and their patience and attention spans are shrinking. By providing bite-sized, snappy content, you can expose your brand and content in a way that users want to consume.
Becoming Viral
Because YouTube Shorts are designed to be quick and punchy, those who do it well have a great chance to stand out and even become viral.
There are a couple of reasons for this, including;
Shareability: Short videos are more likely to be shared by users with people in their sphere and on their social media feeds, so creating something that catches their attention and is short will encourage them to share with others.
A little trick to gaining more YouTube views is that by being more shareable, your content has a greater chance to be exposed to a broader audience, boosting your brand’s organic growth.
Leveraging the Algorithm: Because YouTube values its YouTube Shorts, it prioritizes content on the platform, and the algorithm recognizes channels and pages that incorporate this short video format.
Publishing and incorporating Shorts into your content production is a strategic way to leverage the algorithm to boost your channel and improve your rankings.
There’s a simple reason this is an important mechanism to consider: the higher your content ranks, the more relevant it appears and the broader its reach and exposure.
The increased exposure and enhanced shareability give your content even greater chances of reaching a peak audience.
It may even become a sensation and go viral, making it the most watched and shared content.
Increased Creativity
Another feature of YouTube Shorts is that you can be more creative than with long-form. The reason should be simple to understand.
With long-form video, you have more content space and time to fill, edit, and enhance production value, making it less likely that you’ll consider different types and tones for your content.
But that’s not true with short-form videos, which can be filmed in real-time and edited in almost as little time as it took to film before posting.
This opens up a lot of exploration for content creators, who can try new things, new ways of getting messages across, and discover new types of content that users want to consume.
That’s because, with YouTube Shorts, there are:
A Low Bar Of Entry – Shorts allow creators to stretch their wings and experiment with different types of content and messaging without the time and effort required to produce long-form videos. And if you spend some time improving your YouTube Shorts‘ quality, you’d better stand out from the competition.
Freedom – Short videos allow creative freedom and experimentation with minimal investment and risk, leading to better innovation and content production for longer-form videos on your channel.
Better Audience Engagement – Short-form videos are more accessible to watch and consume, making them easier for your users to share.
Moreover, because the format is designed for more sharing, it heightens users’ engagement, including getting more likes, comments, and shares, all metrics for how YouTube’s algorithm ranks content on its channel.
Interactive Elements – A feature of YouTube Shorts is the ability to add features like text, stickers, and even music to enhance the viewer’s experience, increasing user engagement.
User Interaction – As mentioned, the short-form video is easier to share, making it more likely that users will want to send the content to people in their sphere, from friends to colleagues. This will help boost the visibility of your content.
Now that you understand YouTube Shorts’ appeal better let’s examine the pros and cons to decide whether to work there.
The Pros Of YouTube Shorts
Much of YouTube Shorts’ pros are already found in the appeal of the format, namely, that it’s a quick, easy-to-digest form for content creators to expose their brand to a wide audience.
That said, there’s more to the answer to “Should I do YouTube Shorts?” than simply the appeal. The benefits are much more valuable than simply the ease of the format.
Those pros include:
- Easy To Create
- Increased Visibility
- Exposure To A Younger Audience
- Expanding Your Brand
- Virality Opportunities
- Creative Freedom
- Staying Ahead Of The Competition
Let’s look at each of these benefits a little deeper.
Easy To Create: With the format of short videos that are recorded, edited, and uploaded through an app on a smartphone, it makes it extremely simple to create and publish content through YouTube Shorts.
In addition to being simple to film, because of the time limitations, there isn’t a lot of content that needs to be edited, making it more convenient to produce on-the-spot content. This is great if you’re hosting a live event or promoting something at the moment.
Another feature is that because the videos are short and easy to produce, creators can upload content more frequently, helping boost another critical metric: improved visibility.
And the fact that it is simple to upload new videos also allows content creators more time to work on other aspects of their business without disappearing due to a lack of fresh content on their channels.
Increased Visibility: Because it’s simple to produce and upload short-form videos, content creators can get more content to their audiences.
Coupled with the fact that YouTube is dedicated to promoting the format—they even have a dedicated section on the platform for it—it makes getting your content in front of more people easier than ever.
Because videos are more accessible, they increase the likelihood that more people will see your content than would otherwise be interested in the longer form.
Content creators who utilize YouTube Shorts can increase their channel and brand visibility by producing more content and increasing exposure.
Exposure To A Younger Audience: Because short-form content is extremely popular with the younger set, producing content that exposes your brand to a younger audience in their comfort zones is an excellent strategy for growing your brand organically.
Interacting with a younger audience in the way, tone, and language they want to consume will help you grow your channel, drive more traffic, and increase brand recognition.
Expanding Your Brand: A two-fold strategy focused on traditional long-form content, and one focused on short-form videos is an intelligent way to expand your brand.
By offering content in both formats, you can better reach different audience segmentations where and how they want to consume content, which will help you gain better reach and exposure.
And if you are strategic about the types of content you create for these different segmentations, you’ll have an outstanding opportunity to expand your brand.
Virality Opportunities: The short, punchy content is designed to be more shareable, which is the definition of virality.
Being able to produce engaging content in less than 60 seconds increases the likelihood that you will create something that could border on viral.
And for any content creator, achieving virality is a gold mine in brand exposure and monetization opportunities.
Creative Freedom: YouTube Shorts’ short format provides a unique opportunity for creators to try out new messaging and content ideas. In other words, it frees creators up to be creative.
That creative freedom could be used to experiment with a new feature of your long-form content, a way to pivot your channel or to test drive new ideas without investing a lot of time and resources to test those ideas.
Staying Ahead Of The Competition: As the trend continues to grow and demand for short content flourishes, investing and experimenting with YouTube Shorts allows you to stay ahead of the competition and establish your brand as an authority in this space.
By being a front-runner, your brand will have an increased opportunity to establish its identity and stand out when others in your niche try to establish a foothold in the format.
Increased Monetization Opportunities: With traditional long-form videos, creators can find monetization opportunities on the YouTube platform, an external store, or a website. With YouTube Shorts, the platform provides content producers with additional monetization opportunities with a lower threshold than similar platforms.
In fact, a content creator only needs 1,000 subscribers or 1,000,000 watches within 90 days to qualify for the YouTube Partner Program, a unique monetization opportunity provided by the platform.
Now that we’ve examined the pros of YouTube Shorts let’s look at a few cons to help educate you about whether it’s the correct format.
The Cons Of YouTube Shorts
While there may be many benefits to YouTube Shorts, there are a few cons that you need to consider to answer the question, “Should I work in YouTube Shorts?”
These limitations include but aren’t limited to the following;
- Increased Competition
- Lack Of Long Term Engagement
- Too Many Similar Format Channels
- Limits To Creativity
Increased Competition: As short-form video platforms increase in popularity, so does the number of content creators vying for a piece of the pie. YouTube Shorts is no different. As the platform grows in popularity, so does the number of people creating content solely for brand exposure on it.
This increased competition makes it more difficult for your content to be discovered, begging the question, is it worth it?
Lack Of Long-Term Engagement: Besides becoming more competitive, YouTube Shorts also makes it challenging to engage with long-term audiences. Since the format limits the duration of the video length, it makes it less likely that viewers and users will retain content information over the long haul.
Additionally, because of the proliferation of content on the platform, unless you can churn out top-performing content regularly, there’s a good chance that your content could get lost in the sea of noise, which is all the other content out there.
Too Many Similar Format Channels: In addition to having too much content drowning each other out, using many different yet similar formats creates a glut of content channels for people to consume.
As more people consume short-form videos, that trend will continue, making it more difficult for creators to stand out on any platform.
Limits To Creativity: Another limitation is that the short form limits how deep a creator can dive into a topic, limiting the creativity of your videos.
That said, you can create a short-form video and drive traffic back to your longer content, where you can dive into a more in-depth topic.
Overall, answering the question, “Should I work in YouTube Shorts?” is a personal one that considers the type of content you want to produce, the kind your audience may be interested in consuming, and whether those align.
Raffiti Media is a full-service YouTube management service that partners with creatives with proven results if you have questions about the format and are interested in more information.
Contact us today for a FREE one-on-one discovery call and consultation to see how we can grow your channel through YouTube Shorts and traditional formats.
