How Bite-Sized Videos Engage Your Audience: The Goldfish Model

Video on social media is like dating. It’s almost always best to leave people wanting more. Allow me to explain ☝🏽

Nowadays, people’s attention spans are extremely short, especially on social media. Most marketers are asking themselves “how do we harness our audiences’ attention?” We’ve been asking ourselves that question too.

Additionally, we’ve been working on how Consume Media can provide MORE value for our customers than before. We began the search for these answers by looking through the hours of unused client footage on our hard drives collecting virtual dust. We want to help our clients utilize this!

Our focus in 2019 came down to answering these two questions. How do we capture short attention spans? How do we take advantage of unused footage? We’re pleased to inform you that we have found the answer to both of these questions — The Goldfish Model.

The Goldfish Model helps our clients capture their audiences’ attention on social media by providing them with short-form content taken from footage that may not have made the ‘final cut.’

A few years back, Microsoft did a study on the human attention span. It’s fallen to under 8 seconds — which is shorter than the attention span of a Goldfish (9 seconds). You may have heard this before, but if not, take a moment to let that sink in. This is the reason why most of us can’t watch a TV show or movie without checking our Instagram or thinking about what we want for dinner (tacos, anyone?!).

This short attention span becomes particularly apparent when it comes to social media marketing. Short, consumable content thrives on social media platforms. Generally, users don’t come to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to spend 2 minutes watching a video. Most of us have a little something called Quick Thumb Syndrome (a term I coined) and like to keep on scrolling. Users will pause for a few seconds to watch a video, but unless they are genuinely interested in your brand, they probably won’t watch more than 10 seconds of it. In fact, the average video time for videos on Facebook is 10 seconds

Understanding this information is the key to utilizing your Social Media platforms most efficiently. By providing your audience with a 5-10 second taste of your brand, we can capture their attention, increase brand recognition, and ultimately lead more qualified viewers to your website through linked Call-to-Actions. 

Only about 10% of the footage from a production ends up being used in the final product. For any given project, we could end up having anywhere from 2 to 20 hours of gorgeous footage that simply was not able to fit into the final video.

This unused content is potential energy, if you will. For example, if we have 5 unused hours of footage for a client, we could easily create 50 ten-second video clips for our clients to use across their social marketing efforts.

We’re not saying that no one is going to watch your 90-second brand video or your 2-minute testimonial video, because they absolutely will… if they’re a qualified and interested lead.

This is just to say that most people scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter aren’t willing to stick around for that. By giving them 7 seconds of high-quality content (that they can actually pay attention to), they will scroll past your post remembering your brand and it will leave them wanting more.

On social, let’s play hard to get. Then if they’re interested, they’ll venture to your website where they can find your full videos. One of the most efficient ways to develop interest is with bite-sized video content on social media.

The Goldfish Model is a huge win for our clients. With this new mindset, our clients can receive and utilize extra video content without having to pay for extra video production. But it’s also a win for Consume Media because we get a warm fuzzy feeling inside by providing our clients with content that is beneficial to their brands! Let’s leave people wanting more by using the Goldfish Model. 😉

Learn about other ways our clients are getting more video out of existing footage!