Have you ever heard of YouTube Shorts? Here, you’ll discover what YouTube shorts are and how marketers can benefit from such content type on YouTube. It’s an excellent way for anyone to connect with a new audience with the help of just a smartphone and the Shorts camera provided in the YouTube app.
The tool makes it easier to create videos that are of maximum 15 seconds duration with the option to capture multiple clips.
You are free to use various creative features such as:
Sound & Music: You can add a song or use other audios to create your own Short.
Text: You can add text after recording a Short and use your Timeline to control its appearance
Speed: You can choose to accelerate or slow down the recording
Timer: You can set the countdown for a hands-free recording, and choose to automatically stop recording.
Shorts creators outside India and the U.S. can also get started with Shorts. By uploading a vertical video of 60 seconds and including #Shorts in the title or the description of your video, you can help system recommend your Shorts across YouTube.
What’s so important about YouTube Shorts?
YouTube Shorts is actually YouTube’s response to the rising popularity of short-form video on platforms such as TikTok. It’s a vertical video having a 9:16 aspect ratio that takes up the entire mobile screen and can be of maximum 1 minute duration, offering a different kind of viewing experience for the platform’s users.
We all know how popular is TikTok, a short video Chinese app because part of the appeal of such an app, particularly with younger generation lie in its capacity to instantly satisfy to the viewer as they can go right into the next video to quickly get another satisfying moment. This is the reason why TikTok is such a rage. But last year many countries banned TikTok, and suddenly many similar apps like Dubsmash, Chingari, Connectd, Mitron, and Funimate flooded the social media landscape.
At present, YouTube Shorts isn’t facing a lot of competitions. It’s not like the regular YouTube videos, where you’re competing against a lot of content that has been released since 2005. Shorts hasn’t reached the stage of saturation. Therefore, if you happen to be an early adopter, you’ll likely get more visibility.
Moreover, when a new feature like Shorts is available, you will have two likely scenarios in YouTube. They will keep putting a lot of money behind this—investing in both R&D and paying creators to make content—and focus on getting distribution out. In all likelihood, YouTube will keep pushing and promoting Shorts because they are keen to see you succeed. This makes Shorts a very attractive preposition for both marketers and creators.
At present, Shorts is a level playing field for eyeballs. It’s true that bigger creators will have the advantage of better insight into what an audience will respond to. To succeed, you’ll need to be consistent in publishing, therefore, what you need is a programming, or content strategy. Now, YouTube with TikTok-like ‘Shorts’ feature for beta users in the US has provided a new overview of how Shorts works, and answered some of the most popular queries about the new process.
Shorts’ global content strategist Madisen Dewey in a video outlined the key elements of Shorts, and explained how people can post their short video clips to get them onto the new Shorts feed. He said Shorts are in fact any vertical video, 60 seconds or less that you can upload by following the standard upload flow on a mobile, desktop or your favourite device. The user should use the hashtag #Shorts in the title or description to help with discovery.
There is a dedicated Shorts camera tool that uploads short videos directly within the YouTube app, and you don’t even need to access to that as yet. Instead, you can get your short clips featured in the YouTube’s new Shorts feed.
According to Dewey, Shorts was created because:
With every passing year, there are more people coming to YouTube, looking to create, and YouTube introduced Shorts to make life easier for them. He also provided an overview of the current Shorts creation tools, that YouTube is working to expand. In fact, very soon YouTube will be adding a new ‘Shorts shelf’ to help users locate relevant Shorts content.
Dewey further added that YouTube is also changing its notifications for Shorts to only alert subscribers who had earlier expressed interest in your short content. This is an important note if we consider the opportunities that new option is providing for promotion. As a matter of fact, users can subscribe to the bi-weekly Shorts Report for getting updates on the latest Shorts trends and tips.
