Three Seconds

Three Seconds.

The attention span of an Instagram story.

The lifespan of a tweet before it succumbs to the scroll.

The actual standard for which Facebook counts a video view.

We live in an advertising world where it’s never been harder to capture someone’s attention. As so, we’ve let these consumer behaviors drive our content, opting to create “snackable content” over developing deeper, more meaningful strategies. We’ve also settled for extremely low thresholds to be set as our standard - not even as engagement measures, but “intent” of engagement.

It’s commonplace for brand managers to develop content that will “perform” on certain social channels. This often manifests itself as shorter videos, playing into a current trend that isn’t 100% aligned with the brand, and utilizing assets that don’t support the storytelling approach we all speak about.

All too often we think of the "now.” We sacrifice short-term engagement numbers for actually building the brand.

Think of your favorite book. It’s made up of chapters, paragraphs, sentences. Now think to yourself, are each of those pieces of the book equally entertaining? Most likely not. Some more lackluster parts are needed to set up more entertaining bits.

That’s what we have forgotten, or just not accepted. Not every single post you make is going to perform well, and you just have to accept that. In the long run, you’ll be telling a better story. You’ll be building a better brand.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. A brand can’t be built in three seconds.