10M views on a short-form video | 3 things to learn

What separates a short-form video that gets 10M views from a video that gets 1000 views?

and How can you create a short-form video that gets you a million views?

In the last 6 months, me and my team have posted 1000s of short-form videos for our clients across the world.

Some of our videos have generated 10s of millions of views but some have failed miserably!

Everything I am about to tell you today has been tested for our clients in real time, so the chances of you getting this information anywhere else on the internet are very low!

In September 2016, Zhang Yiming - founder of Chinese tech giant ByteDance launched Tik-Tok.

No one ever predicted that a Chinese app with a cute logo would put giants like Instagram and Facebook under pressure in years to come!

Fast forward to 2023:

You cannot ignore short-form videos

so it is about time that you learn how to create viral short-form videos and use them to your advantage!

I break down every short-form video into three components:

1. Hook

2. Retention

3. CTA - Which is just useless. I will tell you why at the end

Hook(Pattern interrupt)

A hook is something that interrupts consumer patterns online

It is one of the hardest parts to master because you have some strong competitors!

Social media is full of soft-porn, half-naked woman, and people creating content that give dopamine hits after dopamine hits.

You are competing in this sea of drugs!

Let me be honest with you:

• Nobody cares about your story

• Nobody wants to listen to your take

• Nobody gives a fuck if you get views or not

and that is why it is important to master hooks

Here are 3 things that you should keep in mind while creating hooks for your videos:

1. Easy to understand without audio

2. Evoke emotions - negative or positive

3. Should promise value

In short, your video hook should stop people from scrolling and pass their attention to the next phase of the video

Retention

Retention is making people watch the video.

The more they watch your video, the better it is for you.

But it is no joke to make people watch!

Once you hook people in, it is time to deliver on the promise.

It is time to deliver the value!

Here is how you can make people watch your videos for long:

1. Storytelling

Humans love stories.

There is something about stories that makes us curious, that makes us excited, and that makes us feel emotions like nothing else.

Your videos without a story are like a cuisine without salt - It doesn’t matter how good it looks, it won’t taste well and you will be disappointed regardless.

Figure out how you can introduce stories to your videos.

People stay for the stories.

Stories are how you make them watch your videos.

Stories are how you skyrocket your video retention.

2. Delayed Value

Think about a movie that you fell in love with.

A movie that you can watch on repeat.

You love a movie when the protagonist goes through struggle, suffering, and pain. You love the movie when the character builds slowly.

You enjoy the journey of transformation with curiosity about what would happen to the main character.

Imagine how would you react if the main character dies or succeeds in the first 10 minutes of the movie.

You would have no incentive to watch a 3-hour long movie.

In the same way, if your video gives away everything in the first 10 seconds, viewers don’t have an incentive to watch the full video.

Delay the value of your videos to maximize retention.

Call to Action

A call to action is an absolute waste of time

You are just wasting the last 2-3 seconds of your video with a call to action because people are not going to follow you when you tell them to do so - they will follow you if they like your content.

99% of viewers skip CTAs and it just causes a huge dip in retention.

I didn’t realize it until yesterday. I was making the same mistake and it cost me a lot of views!

Let me do the math for you:

If a video is 60 seconds long

Every 1 second of CTA that viewers skip will cause a 1.6% reduction in your retention and

If your CTA is 3 seconds long and everyone skips it that’s you losing 5% in retention

Those 2 wasted seconds, in the end, could be the difference between a video that gets 10,000 views vs the one that gets 1M views!

and we have tested this time and time again using data.

so the better option is always to end the video with

• The conclusion of a story

• A question

• Lopping the video, or

• Even ending it abruptly!

We generate millions of organic views every month for our clients across all social media platforms.

We are able to do it with an expert team of animators, managers, marketers, copywriters, and data analysis experts.

If you want to grow your brand with organic content, book a free call with us at contentfloww

Talk soon

-Akshat