It’s been no secret that people’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. The average attention span for humans is currently 8.25 seconds, and “it decreased by almost 25% from 2000 to 2015” (Schiller, 2023). The result is a shift in the way people consume media, and by extension, social media marketing.
One of today’s key players that has been linked to the discussion on people’s shorter attention spans is TikTok. “When it launched, videos on the app had a 15-second duration cap, and as of February, it has increased the maximum length to 10 minutes” (Fallon, 2022). While TikTok now allows for longer videos, it still has a reputation for being a short-form content app where many videos continue to be very short. The video length cutoff that it initially had forced creators to get to their points quickly and grab viewers’ attention within the first few seconds.
Using TikTok for social media marketing capitalizes on a very popular app, and is a great way to get content in front of users who want to know something right away and be shown why they should be purchasing a product or using a service extremely quickly. As someone who uses TikTok, I’ve been guilty of using a combination of speed-reading the captions in the video and the fast forward bar to get through an already short video even more quickly. In addition, if there are videos in which the creators take a long time to get to the point, chances are, you’ll see others comment the time stamp at which the creator gets to the main idea, for those who don’t want to listen to extraneous information. That goes to show that people are here to learn and be informed, but only in a short amount of time, or else, they’ll continue their scroll.
In these two examples, users are being influenced to buy things from Amazon and visit a sandwich shop in about 30 seconds. Videos on TikTok that are shared for marketing purposes offer a master class in the length that your content should be in order to capture and sustain people’s attention and then persuade them to be a part of your call-to-action. In addition, these pieces of content also show how you should be editing said videos. Even if a video is short, people might not get all the information they need to see why this should be relevant to them. The above videos include quick cuts and relevant information in the on-screen captions that give viewers a very good sense of what these items are, how they’re useful, and whether these products are of interest to them. So, the moral of the story is to have all the important information that you want about your product or service on the screen, and to keep everything short and sweet.
References:
https://www.thetreetop.com/statistics/average-human-attention-span