Your Brand Will Look Great in These Shorts

SUMMER OF SHORTS

For years we’ve all been hearing about what an amazing opportunity YouTube is for digital marketers, but the hill has always been a bit too high to climb for most brands. That may be changing with YouTube Shorts.

YouTube sounds easy in principle – anyone can post a video, and if that video is good enough, it can take advantage of the search engine, earning us fame and fortune along the way. In practice, however, posting content to YouTube can be a much greater lift than channels like Instagram, where most brand content consists of a single image and a caption. The result is that even the brands that have been brave enough to fire up a YouTube channel typically upload just a few times per year, at best, and most of those videos are highly produced brand content.

I’m sure that’s what the folks at YouTube had in mind, at least in part, when they came up with Shorts, but I wonder if even they imagined it would get the kind of adoption it’s already seeing. Shorts are now attracting 1.5 Billion viewers per month (for context, all of Netflix has fewer than 250 Million subscribers).

Pair that with the casual, short format (which looks a lot like TikTok and Instagram Reels) and you have a potentially powerful opportunity for brands that have been waiting on the sidelines. Why? Because many of us are already creating vertical videos for IG, so we have the content on hand, and when we also share it to YouTube it gains all of the additional benefits from its search engine. There are also far fewer brands posting to YouTube than other social channels like Instagram, so the completion is much lower.

Content on hand + powerful benefits + reduced competition = a channel that we should all be seriously considering for our content plans.

Interested? Here are a few resources worth digging into:

• How YouTube Shorts work with the search algorithm
• YouTube’s new editing features for Shorts creators
• Product tagging for e-commerce
• More feature updates, including save to draft

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting