How Short-Form Content Took Over Social Media
Video has taken over social media.
The rise of TikTok has reshaped the social media landscape to include short-form video. Whether it be trends, business-related insights, or silly dances, short-form video has taken precedence over images, graphics, and long-form content.
It may be easy to assume that the whole shift was caused directly by TikTok’s sudden dominance. But while the boom can be attributed to TikTok, short-form video is not anything new. To understand why short-form video has become so popular, we need to revisit a now-defunct app that was highly popular in the early to mid-2010s.
The Rise and Fall of Vine
Vine was a popular short-form video app that was, in certain ways, an early version of TikTok, but with 6 second clips. It was sold to Twitter for a whopping $30 billion in October 2012. A majority of Vine content included funny videos which still remain popular up to this day.
A quick search on YouTube for popular Vines will result in a number of compilations. Many influencers also rose out of Vine, including Logan Paul. The Verge reported that, “Paul, whose Vines looped more than 4 billion times, parlayed his following into a series of acting roles — while earning $200,000 to create a single Vine for a brand, according to a recent 60 Minutes report.”
The success of Vine, however, was short-lived – for only four years, to be exact. Twitter ended the platform due to business issues.
But despite the end of the app, its legacy still lives on. According to a medium.com article from a graduate student from the University of Florida, “Vine’s real legacy is its impact on social media. It forced other platforms to evolve to meet the need of short-form video content. Without Vine, we may never have had Tiktok, Snapchat, or Instagram videos. So just remember next time when you're watching an old Vine complication on Youtube that Vine created the digital landscape that allowed video to thrive on social media.”
So… What About TikTok?
TikTok’s rise is similar to that of short-form content: it feels like it came out of nowhere. But there’s more than meets the eye. According to an article by The Washington Post, “In five years, the app, once written off as a silly dance-video fad, has become one of the most prominent, discussed, distrusted, technically sophisticated and geopolitically complicated juggernauts on the internet — a phenomenon that has secured an unrivaled grasp on culture and everyday life and intensified the conflict between the world’s biggest superpowers.”
TikTok, however, was not always TikTok. It started as an app called musical.ly, which was founded in 2014. Eventually, the app was purchased by ByteDance, a China-based company, in 2017 for $800 million.
According to Statista, the U.S. leads the world in the number of active users on TikTok, with 148.92 million as of 2024. The app started gaining traction in 2017, but the user base exploded by 45% between 2020-2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
TikTok’s Impact in Social Media Land
There are many differences separating TikTok from other social media apps. Aside from it being the predominant player in short-form video, it also introduced a new idea through its “For You” page. According to social media agency Eight Clients, “the “For You” page allows users to explore a variety of trending topics and content at any given moment. This page updates regularly with new material from across the platform, meaning there is always something new for users to discover.”
This idea is somewhat revolutionary – instead of users simply having a feed filled with content from people they follow, TikTok was using its algorithm to show personalized recommendations. Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon, describes this feature as a fundamental change in social media. In a speech at SXSW in 2024 by Conte, he stated,
“TikTok had a much deeper impact in the ecosystem I think [than] anyone foresaw at the time. It wasn’t just short-form, vertical first video. That wasn’t it. That’s a red herring, I think. It was much more fundamental than that. TikTok said, ‘we want to make the most engaging feed possible.’ This whole idea of a list of subscriptions? Forget about that. In fact, forget about the whole concept of subscriptions. TikTok started from the ground up with something totally different called ‘For You,’ where each of these posts are chosen for me, by TikTok, instead of me choosing what’s in my feed. And this completely abandoned the concept of the follow.”
Everyone Loves Short-Form Video
TikTok brings both positives and negatives to the table. It has routinely been described as “addicting,” even by social media experts themselves. “I’m no stranger to a certain amount of time-eating scrolling on social media,” writes Kirsti Lang for Buffer, “but TikTok is something else. I’ve been engrossed by the social media app for hours on end — and the TikTok algorithm is to blame.”
Recognizing how engaging TikTok’s algorithm was, Instagram decided to get into the game. In August 2020, Instagram launched Reels, its short-form video content option. “It’s the newest opportunity for Instagram to bring in users, increase the amount of time people spend in the app every day, and establish itself as a video entertainment platform” wrote The Verge. Instagram even copied the “For You” page by adding a Reels option in the menu bar.
The change proved to be successful. The app saw an increase in 40% of time spent on Instagram after Reels launched. In 2021, after its newfound success on Instagram, Reels launched on Facebook.
Soon, video giant YouTube caught on, rolling out a beta of their option, Shorts, in India, prior to making the feature available worldwide soon after. In a blog post, YouTube stated that “the average number of daily first time creators more than doubled” in a year since they launched Shorts.
Short-form video is popular for many reasons, among them being accessibility, ease of sharing, and the low cost it takes to produce, according to Buffer. Brands and businesses are incorporating short-form video content into their overall social media and marketing strategies – it not only helps to get their message across, but does so effectively with declining attention spans. “With an average video length of 15-30 seconds,” writes Hootsuite, “creators can deliver their message in a very small window of time – allowing viewers to consume content on the go with little to no commitment.”
With all of the pros of short-form content – especially for brands – it’s safe to say that in the coming years, we can expect short-form content to continue in popularity.
I’m Sean Formantes, a graphic designer and content creator for social media. I am a lover of music, art, and coffee.