For digital marketing, the era of short-form video has arrived. With YouTube Shorts designed to mimic the breakaway success of TikTok, which is better for your brand? Should you be on both? Let’s take a look.
YouTube Shorts
As with Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts were launched as a direct competitor to the immense success TikTok has found in social media spaces. Unlike Instagram Reels, however, YouTube Shorts is seeing a lot of global success in the year since it first launched. Designed to act as a secondary content type to the long-form videos YouTube is known for, it offers specific 60-second videos hosted through the YouTube App.
This puts it in direct competition with TikTok, which allows for 15-second to 60-second video uploads. TikTok is present on the Chinese market as Douyin. Ironically, TikTok is now experimenting with longer format videos, now allowing for up to 3-minute uploads.
How Do They Differ?
Despite these similarities, the two platforms do serve noticeably different niches. Unlike TikTok, which only allows for short-form videos, YouTube Short’s selling point is the overall integration of shorts into the wider YouTube ecosystem. Remember that YouTube is now the second-largest search engine in the world. Additionally, there has been a massive push from YouTube into the wider video streaming ecosystem, including bundling with some streaming services and platforms (like Roku and FireTV). That’s an immensely powerful social media platform in it own right, not simply a TikTok competitor.
Direct Comparison
However, returning to shorts, the two platforms offer much of the same to content creators. With TikTok music integrated into the platform and YouTube music libraries for creators to use, analytics to track performance, engagement, scrolling feeds, monetization, closed captioning and overlying text, and so on, you can use both for compelling short video content.
However, YouTube shorts still lacks the ‘duet’ feature where multiple creators can upload other’s content, the TikTok Q&A, and the discover tag. In turn, YouTube allows for inbuilt scheduling of Shorts, a parental restriction feature, post-upload editing, and unlisted shorts which require a link to view.
Choosing a Platform
The primary difference, however, is still that YouTube Shorts is not directly a social media platform. It doesn’t have the ‘content share community’ focus, nor the ability to directly interact with fans, direct message creators, and so on. It’s also lengthier to access, with no direct app, making it less appealing as a ‘quick content’ platform.
Rather than trying to decide between the two as competing social media apps, it’s best to view them as two different packages. TikTok brings you immense youth popularity alongside a social platform specifically focused on short-form video storytelling. YouTube Shorts, on the other hand, brings you a convenient new way to better develop your presence on YouTube and can work as a fantastic aide to longer-form content videos, too.
So, as always, it comes down to your target audience and brand goals. TikTok offers a great new social platform to expand your reach on, especially if you are targeting younger markets. YouTube has expanded its stable with a hot new content type, while still bringing all the older features to the table, and has a broader audience appeal that translates surprisingly well to niche markets too. Both can be a powerful part of a smart social media marketing strategy.