How can you attract the younger age groups to a social platform and make them stay? Good content? Featuring famous people? Not really… The young generation wants something short and they want many of them… Like Tik Tok videos. Tik Tok has grown very quickly amongst 16-24 years olds, by providing a high volume of user generated short video content. And now all other social media platforms are looking for ways to reach out to this age group.

That is one of the reasons YouTube (quietly) launched YouTube Shorts in September 2020. It is still in Beta, so that was not a very loud launch… YouTube Shorts is basically videos that are less than 60 seconds long and in vertical format. The creators have been quick to adapt to this new format and the first YouTube Short videos managed to get millions of views.

In September, YouTube also launched a new section for Shorts on the YouTube app in India. What this meant was, the creators in India could create short videos right from the YouTube app with the tools specifically designed for this. In the YouTube app, under the ‘Create’ section YouTube added a new button called, ‘Create a Short’. This category hosts new camera tools, speed, music and time options and enables the users to make 15 seconds long videos. Last week, on the 19th of March YouTube launched this new app feature in the US. So that means with US creators joining, the competition in YouTube Shorts will start to get much tougher.

If you can access ‘Create a Short’ option from your YouTube app, here is an explainer video about how to make the best of this new feature:

YouTube features Shorts on the homepage, under Shorts shelf on the YouTube app. But there is not a Shorts section on the web yet.
You can access Shorts from the web from this link: https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/shorts

Or simply type in #shorts in the search bar to find the shorts on www.youtube.com.

Now, go and enjoy creating some YouTube #shorts!