Short-form videos are now a huge part of major social media platforms. YouTube has YouTube Shorts, Facebook and Instagram have Reels, and even Twitter has the feature. Meta is trying to make their version better by extending the maximum duration to a minute and a half.
New Reels Features
Meta found a way to compete with TikTok by releasing its very own Reels on Facebook as well as Instagram. Although Instagram Reels has already gotten its extension last July, Facebook is only now getting the update.
Aside from that, Facebook Reels now has a feature that can synchronize the clips with music called Grooves. Meta claims that the feature is made possible by "visual beat technology," which automatically aligns the motion in the video with the beat of the song, according to Engadget.
Facebook also now offers a way for users to easily create Reels from Facebook memories, Furthermore, there are now trending templates that can be used to add effects to the short-form video that a user will publish.
Still, it's far shorter than what TikTok, one of Facebook's competitors, can offer. The maximum video length for TikTok is now ten minutes, and it still has more video and audio effects to offer than Facebook Reels currently does.
Despite that, the Meta platform Reels is seeing growing success, since the number of Reels played has already doubled over the past year, reports say. The same also goes for reshares of Reels in the last six months.
Read Also: How to Add Voiceover to Your Instagram Reel
The Appeal of Short-Form Videos
Short videos are taking over social media platforms, and people seem to prefer them over videos that would last more than ten minutes. This is also why TikTok hit the jackpot as its main purpose of it is for creating and watching the trending format.
One of the reasons why this is so appealing to users is that you can get the entire context of content in just a few seconds. They won't have to go through long explanations and lengthy intros as the subject is immediately revealed due to its short duration.
There's also the fact that people have shorter attention spans now. We now have access to more information as opposed to what people had decades ago, and it's natural that people are eager to try and see as much as they can.
A report from The American Press Institute back in 2014 says that six out of ten people do not read past the headlines. Users will try to go through content quickly that they just skim instead of reading an entire article.
Shorter attention spans are also connected to the technology that users have been used to. For instance, older children can keep their attention on a particular subject longer than younger children, as mentioned in Counter Currents.
Scientific research claims that our attention span has drastically decreased over the years. In the year 2000, people had an attention span of 12 seconds. By 2015, that has shortened to just 8.25 seconds.
Related: Reels Now Account for More Than 20% of the Time Users Spend on Instagram
