The algorithm won!
Publishing content online is liberating because you can do what you want. But to get results you have to do what they want!
Over the last 12 months I’ve had many conversations regarding shorts & adapting our Story Untold ZW. Many have suggested that shorter form content (i.e cutting parts of our interviews and having them as snippets) would help with growth. My default response was insisting that on YouTube we were long form and long form only. Alas I was wrong!
Because I was wrong my tone in this post might not be the most humble but don’t lose sight of what I’m saying because of that - haha!
My assumptions were that our short form content (snippets from the full length videos) would be hosted on Instagram and TikTok - you know, the platforms that actually love short video content. Where I was wrong was regarding how serious YouTube is about going into short form video and challenging those two platforms.
This was the working assumption until someone in a WhatsApp group that they had started sharing Shorts and had managed to grow their channel to 1k subs in 3 months! Remember that’s a milestone we are yet to actually reach and it then dawned on me that not only was my assumption wrong but over the last few months - YouTube has been doubling down on Shorts and their announcements support this.
So my first mistake was thinking YouTube wouldn’t take shorts seriously which they did and we’ve missed a ton of free promotion because of it. Shorts are being promoted left, right and centre because it’s the new format and up until now we haven’t been able to benefit from that growth at all. The algorithm is giving a lot of love to whoever plays to its new favourite format - which we have largely ignored.
Beyond just playing to the algorithm - my assumption at the moment is that shorter format snippets could help audiences decide whether they want to watch our full-length content. The stuff we put out is quite long and many times it is the first exposure someone has to that individual so deciding on whether they should watch a 1 hour long interview can largely be helped if they have exposure to shorter 1-2 minute clips. Long story short the snippets could help with acquisition if done right.
I have an interview to go and shoot soon so I’ll leave this at that for now, and going forward you’ll continue to see our long form videos followed by 5-10 short snippets that we think will help us:
with the algorithm as we are now a “shorts creator" *rolls eyes*;
with the algorithm as we are now uploading more often;
acquisition as people get shorter versions that help them decide if they are actually interested in the full-length video