The 3-5 Second Rule For Short Form Video

Published 6 months ago • 1 min read

Hey team,

Happy new year! I hope its been a good break for you and your loved ones and you're all refreshed and ready to go into 2025

This year, Im back with weekly email newsletters breaking down whats working, whats not and how you can grow your audience and generate more customers from social media

So, to kick things off, here's some interesting data I found about what causes a short form video to perform well on social media... The drop off in retention between the third and fifth second pretty clearly correlates to how well the video performs in terms of views

All the videos I looked at for this client had a 10-15% drop off in views in the first second, regardless if the video got 500 views or 50,000 views

All the videos by the 3rd second had 65-59% retention after 3 seconds, again, regardless of if the video received a lot of views or very few views, the retention after 3 seconds was about the same.

Some of the better performing videos were even on the lower end of retention at this point

However what was obvious was the drop off after that point was massive

The lower the drop off in retention from the 3rd second to the 5th second, directly correlated with how many views the video got

The video with the most views, had only 5% drop off in retention

The video with the least amount of views had a 12% drop off in retention

And all the videos in between were in a perfect line, the most the drop off between the 3rd second and 5th second, the less views it had

Here's what you can do with this information:

The first 3 seconds of your video are the most important when it comes to how well your video will perform

And how well you did in those first 3 seconds is measured by how many people stay watching your video soon after they have heard those first 3 seconds

Good first 3 seconds, people stay watching, retention stays high, views explode

Bad first 3 seconds, people stop watching, retention plummets, the video gets no views and people say 'Im shadow banned, the platform hates me'

So, spend twice as much time on the opening 3 seconds of your next video, and watch how your numbers improve

Hope this helps

To your success,

Josh

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