Recently we covered a Twitter post by the head of Instagram where TikTok was mentioned as a primary motivator for social media platforms to improve and evolve. It doesn’t seem, however, that the Chinese-owned company will just sit and watch as the rest of the players try to catch up.
TikTok has officially announced that it will be introducing longer videos to the app, allowing its users to upload up to three minutes worth of content. The company first tested out the waters with the feature at the very end of last year by allowing some top contributors to make use of it.
In the dawn of TikTok, the platform limited its community to only fifteen seconds of video length. In 2020, that restriction loosened to a neat full minute. However, for some formats, sixty seconds didn’t seem to cut it. Videos like step-by-step cooking, beauty tutorials, or educational material are often split into multiple parts to facilitate everything the uploader wants to portray.
In his article, Drew Kirchhoff, Product Manager at TikTok, says that with longer videos the company believes creatives “will have the canvas to create new or expanded types of content on TikTok, with the flexibility of a bit more space.”
The new option to create longer videos will be rolling out to everyone on the platform in the coming weeks. When you receive the update, the app will notify you.
Will this help TikTok stay ahead of the curve and a pioneer in the industry? Well, we will find out if we see its biggest competitors, namely YouTube Shorts and Snapchat Spotlight, follow in its footsteps.
Let us not forget that Instagram will be getting a new full-screen video feature, and even though it can be considered the underdog, you never know how successful such changes could be.
