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As the 2020s progress, video content continues to rise in popularity with the growth of major social streaming platforms. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube all structure their applications to prioritize video posts over photos, offering short-form and long-form video content catering to audiences that prefer more engagement. Instagram is a particularly intriguing case, as the platform initially promoted photo content alone in the early 2010s.
However, even their photo slides now include an auditory component, which basically lets app users incorporate music into their posts. While programs might extend desktop compatibility, their mobile-forward nature promotes faster internet speeds, making mass video consumption all the more appealing. This increased consumer demand for quick, digestible media pushes video content applications into the mainstream over platforms like X (formerly Twitter), which used to focus on written posts. This poses an important question: is video becoming more popular than written text?
Nate Nead, CEO of VID and Marketer, provides essential insights on the subject.
Social media’s shift
Social media’s role has significantly shifted within the last decade. Components such as accessibility, data security, influencer marketing, platform transformation, user experience, and user growth have all led to swift evolution across the various media platforms.
Mobile devices receive priority treatment over desktops and laptops, and media programs are readily available in the palm of your hand as a result. Text-based communications have been replaced by social media users’ preference for interactive and dynamic visual content like live streaming.
To add to that, social media usage has increased exponentially in the United States alone, which means a bigger audience than ever is subscribing to the appeal of videos. A study shows that American users went from 5% of the US in 2005 to 79% in 2019. The 2020s are expected to grow even more than last decade.
There is a scientific component to this huge increase in user numbers. Social media platforms prioritize engaging content such as video posts within their algorithms: Instagram automatically curates Reels and interactive content based on users’ likes and bookmarks, and TikTok’s “For You” page is another example of a media feature that leverages algorithms. User engagement now depends on video content, leading to higher retention rates, shareability, and virality.
Short-form video content: TikTok’s impact
Short-form content first came to real prominence with the launch of Vine in the mid-2010s. This app no longer exists but offered users a platform to create videos for up to seven seconds each. After Vine vanished, the audience it cultivated wanted a similar app, which is where TikTok came in.
TikTok, which merged with Musical.ly in 2018, took things up a notch as it permitted users to create video content ranging between fifteen seconds to a whole minute long. Now, the platform has live streaming alongside hour-long video posts. A video created through the TikTok app can only be as long as ten minutes; however, users can upload videos from their library that are a total of 60 minutes each.
Ultimately, TikTok changed the content game with its short, highly engaging format. According to Nead, “YouTube used to be the second largest search engine, but the number of searches on TikTok has not only eclipsed YouTube, but Google itself.” Subsequently, TikTok’s pandemic-based popularity influenced the many platforms that preceded it, causing short-form features like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.
Written content’s resilience and content consumption’s future
Despite video content’s rapid growth, written content still holds value in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), in-depth information, and professional industries. Things such as blogs, long-form articles, and whitepapers continue to appeal to certain markets, so a hybrid approach could increase the staying power of written and video content together. Some brands now leverage a combination of both mediums to maximize their engagement and reach. Trends such as Augmented or Virtual Reality (AR/VR) could potentially impact the future of content consumption as users crave increased interactive experiences.
Although video content may gain additional traction, written content is still a place for deeper, more detailed content consumption.
