3 things i learned my very 1st time making short form content 📌
1⃣ Every video gets shown to a test audience of 100-200 users. This is an audition to test people's retention (how much of the video they watch before skipping), and if you do well you'll get shown to a larger batch of users
2⃣ Retention is everything. The algorithm decides whether to push you based on how long people watch. There's many little tricks and techniques to improve retention, which you'll gradually notice if you pay attention.
A common one is constantly cutting footage instead of showing one long single line. Humans get bored seeing the same thing, so the constant switching of scenes keeps them hooked.
3⃣ The hook (first 2 seconds) is the most important part of the video. It will literally make or break your video. If it's not interesting, doesn't pose an interesting question, state a cool fact, or somehow grasp the user's attention, they're insta scrolling away.
You're better off focusing your time on the 1st 2 seconds than the rest of the video combined.
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It's completely humbling to start from scratch on a craft you know nothing about.
I'm having to learn how to manually edit everything in CapCut (no AI). I'm asking Claude on how to write a convincing script, what kind of footage to film, what i should name the title - basically every component of making short form video. It does appear that his training data for short form is somewhat decent? (although I wouldn't know if it's good or bad anyways, I have no prior exp)
What I love about short form is it's completely skill based. Your videos always get a test audition. On X, a brand new account will literally get 0 views. In short form, everyone has a chance, and it's the strength of your video that determines your success.
Even with me starting a brand new account with ZERO promotion, just plain firing into the algo, I got 1k views per video on YouTube 😱 TikTok and IG had substantially less, at 100-400 views per.
Small sample size but I think I'm improving - my average watch times went from 4->6->15s and skip rate went from 66->54->26%. Again, short form is purely skill based, so a good executor should be able to learn and grow predictably.
Excited to keep pushing on this! Feels good to acquire some valuable skills during the bear.
