A few months back I had a video go viral on facebook reels, the strange thing is I had already posted this exact same video (made back in 2022 during the World Cup) it performed ok but then I made this small tweak and it reached over 2 million people.
It was one of my fun edits where I come out of the TV.
I realised that the video was way too long.
The action happens, the surprise/ridiculousness of the player coming out of the game and into my front room.
Then I just stand there and walk off, nothing interesting happens after that point.
I went to repost the video and realising this I got rid of the final 6 seconds because it was completely unnecessary.
The hard cut, giving the audience something amazing/interesting/unique whatever it is and then cut the video at the height of the emotion.
This resulted in people watching all the way to the end, which of course the algorithm loves.
You can see each post below-
Original video 👇🏻 (11 seconds)
https://www.facebook.com/reel/265356022635863/?s=fb_shorts_profile&stack_idx=0
Cut down video 👇🏻 (5 seconds - more than half of the original!!)
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1162812375263300/?s=fb_shorts_profile&stack_idx=0
This taught me that you can’t have ANY dead space in a video.
Not even a fraction of a second!
People are busy, they don’t care. They have other content, notifications, messages vying for their attention.
So get to it.
My most viral videos all have a watch time that is more than the length of the video. Quite simply because they have watched it more than once.
The screen shot below shows another video that has over 80 Million views on YouTube shorts, the average view duration is double that of the video meaning people are watching twice.
Use your audience retention graphs to learn, refine and find errors in your videos.
Don’t give them a chance to swipe away.
The platform loves you for it because you are keeping people on the platform.
It will keep pushing out your video to more and more people.
Quite simply, can you make them watch twice?
PS - If this helped you in anyway, please forward to someone else that it may help. I write these posts to share an honest account of what I’m learning and facing each day as a video and content creator in the hope that it helps others.