They (apparently some experts) say that the average video on social media has three seconds to get someone's attention...three seconds.
I can remember when I was in high school, seeing a bumper sticker after leaving a tournament we were playing in that read, "Soccer Players do it for 90 Minutes." Obviously, that was in reference to how long a game is, and NOTHING ELSE (where is your head right now?), and I remember saying, "I want that bumper sticker." However, and since I'm self-aware, albeit only sometimes, I knew that putting that bumper sticker on the back of my horrendously awful 1988 Maroon Ford Taurus probably wasn't the best move I could make. The last thing I wanted to do at age seventeen was draw any more attention to that car.
It had doors that barely locked, hubcaps that wanted to fall off more than they wanted to stay on, and a very shaky transmission. It went zero to sixty in about a minute and a half, and I won't tell you the nickname my friends gave it, but let's say it's worse than the "soccer players do it for 90 minutes analogy mentioned earlier.
There are too many memories attached to that car, too many to count, that mean something to me, that mean something to my friends, that I still tell to this day, and it's just a car. I mean, it's a total piece of crap, but tell me a first car that wasn't, and I'll call you a liar. Countless stories, like the story of building out a makeshift stereo and subwoofer with my best friend and a lot of 2pac songs, a story about taking my friends to Taylor Falls to jump off the cliffs into the river, to a roadtrip to Milwaukee for a soccer tournament, and getting one dollar from each friend I drove to school that week for gas, because at the time it was less than a dollar a gallon.
I bet for everyone reading this, there's a story about your first car, and your second car, maybe even your third and I bet when you tell those stories you're not concerned about how long they take to tell, or telling them perfectly because what you're describing is the truth, it triggers an emotion, and for your audience, whoever that may be, they love it when you tell those stories because everytime you do, they feel like a part of the story.
But now, we live in a world where stories are all vertically formatted, and instead of 90 minutes, they're ninety seconds, and the only way to break through to someone's minimal attention span is to include a hook or a riser within the first three seconds of that video so they don't scroll on past to the next story that does. The world we live in has allowed social media platforms to dictate what a good story is, not because of the content, but the way it's packaged.
Yes, the world we live in is more centered around a set of rules that tell us, "Your video won't be recommended to a new audience if it doesn't fall within our guidelines," which is interesting because for some reason we all care about going viral, yet in the same breath complain about not seeing our friends content and instead seeing nothing but suggested and sponsored ads.
Three seconds to get your attention, and ninety seconds to keep it, that's all you got. Or, and this is just an idea...you stop caring about what a social algorithm thinks you should do, and tell the story as it was intended, and see what happens. The people who were designed to see the story will, and those who weren't, well, won't.
For a story to be great, it needs to be timeless, and although my 1988 Maroon Ford Taurus that my mother bought for me for $300 bucks wasn't, the stories I still tell to this day are.
Thanks for hanging in there.
Sincerely,
The Soccer Player
P.S. Not that I'm trying to make this any more obvious than it needs to be, but I can help you tell "the real story," without all the marketing fluff.
