Considering TikTok is a short-form video platform that places a heavy emphasis on viral videos, it can be important to understand the minimum and maximum video lengths. Unlike YouTube and other video-sharing platforms, TikTok doesn’t allow users to upload incredibly long videos, even though the maximum length has slowly been increasing over the years. When it comes to the minimum length, establishing a hard or soft limit is a little more tricky.
When TikTok first launched, a video could only be a maximum of 15 seconds. Later on, it became possible to create one-minute TikToks by combining four 15-second videos together. More recently, TikTok increased the maximum video length to three minutes, marking a considerable improvement on how long a video could be. Since then, TikTok has increased this limit even further.
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As of March 2022, TikTok has offered creators the option to upload videos that are as long as ten minutes. This is not only the current maximum video length, but the longest duration TikTok has ever offered. Whether it continues to increase the limit in the future remains to be seen, but it is possible. At the same time, considering TikTok’s short, viral nature is what so many like about the platform, TikTok might not want to run the risk of alienating its impressive user base by diluted the platform with very long videos.
Understanding TikTok’s Minimum Video Length
While there is a hard limit on how long a TikTok can be, there’s less firm information on how short a video needs to be. Technically, there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping a creator from uploading a video as short as three seconds, but this is largely thought to be a bad idea. After all, there’s very little that can be conveyed in a video that only lasts a few seconds. Based on this, there is also some debate on how short a TikTok should be, irrespectively of what the actual hard limit might be.
There are plenty of videos that utilize the #5seconds hashtag. In spite of only being five seconds long, some of these videos have accumulated millions of views, suggesting that a minimum of five seconds is a good soft limit to consider. There is also a #7secondvideo challenge that has proven popular in the past. Then again, there is also the view that 15 seconds is an equally good soft limit for TikTok videos, which makes some sense when considering that 15 seconds was once the maximum limit. As TikTok has increased its maximum video length, it makes sense that the algorithm may also start to favor videos that are somewhat longer than before, even at the minimum length level.
With almost no hard limit on the minimum and a maximum of ten minutes possible, TikTok does provide more options than ever before when it comes to video length. As is often the case, however, understanding what is the perfect video length will likely vary based on the creator and the content. With TikTok being a platform that favors short and viral videos, using the full ten minutes probably won’t be the best idea for all creators, nor will videos that are just too short to get the point or message across.
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