While Millennials prefer receiving information in video form, simply creating a video won’t guarantee that you attract them to your brand. Millennials possess certain traits that you’ll want to consider when creating your video strategy:
- Millennials have a short attention span. A 2015 Canadian study by Microsoft entitled “Attention Spans” found that the average attention span of adults is about eight seconds. With so much content flooding the average consumer’s life, attention is pulled in many directions. Millennials are exposed to thousands of branded pieces of content every day, and your video content is competing for some of that time.
Because of the abundance of content and their notoriously short attention span, Millennials have developed a subconscious process to determine the value of a video. If they quickly determine that the video isn’t stimulating enough, then it’s on to the next one. Remember that process when you’re developing the opening content.
- Video needs to provide real value. If the viewer can’t derive utility, it does more harm than good to your brand. You need to provide some benefit to the Millennial viewer if you want to build a lasting relationship. That benefit can be humor, information, or other values.
- Most viewers won’t see the end. The majority of your Millennial viewers, even those that stick around the longest, won’t see the very end of your video. Once the climax of your video closes out, there is a distinct possibility that your audience will move on to something else.
- Quality isn’t crucial, but it matters. This generation has grown up collecting hours of video footage on a small, hand-held device. High-end production quality is great to have, so if it’s an option, you should choose it. But Millennials watch hours of Snapchat video, Facebook Live video, and other mobile and hand-held video content. If your video content isn’t studio quality, it won’t necessarily discourage Millennials from engaging with it. That said, professionalism is something that Millennials care about, so keep it as professional as possible.
You should use the best quality video that you can afford. Also, native video is always the preference. Millennials engage much more heavily with video that was loaded to a network than to external links that populate a feed. YouTube videos are watched most on YouTube, Facebook videos on the social network itself, and so on.
