Just about every smart entrepreneur and marketer is creating content now, which means you have more competition than ever for the attention of your audience.
That’s why it’s critical to keep in touch with which content formats are currently getting the highest engagement so you can put your effort into creating content that will get and hold attention.
Here’s what you should be producing now!

Long-form video

Here are some incredible stats about the state of video in today’s market:

• One-third of online activity is spent watching video.
• In 2019 it’s expected that internet video traffic will account for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic.
• 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.

Source: Wordstream
While the far majority of videos being produced now are very short, long-form videos that take the time to educate and entertain more thoroughly get incredible engagement and create deep relationships with your audience.
There are also more channels for distributing longer videos as well. Youtube still dominates of course, but Facebook Watch and IGTV have both become very powerful distribution channels as well.

Video ‘stories’

On the opposite end of the spectrum from long-form videos are video ‘stories’. I’m referring to videos that are posted on the Instagram Story and Facebook Story channels.
Stories are seeing incredible engagement and growth, and video is what works best. In fact, social video generates 12 times more shares than text and images combined.

Source: Techcrunch
And the great thing about Story videos is that they can be very informal and unedited. Simply turn your phone vertical and start capturing what’s happening in your day, and you’ve created content that your fans will love (‘day-in-the-life’ content is one of the most popular formats)!

Podcasts

Podcasts have a massive advantage over other forms of content: they can be listened to while doing other things.
You can listen to your favorite podcasts while out on run, walking the dog, cooking, working out at the gym, or driving. That’s a big reason why podcasts are growing so quickly and have such great engagement and loyalty.
Check out these podcast stats from Podcast Insights.

The great news is that producing regular podcast content does not need to be hard. Simply export the audio of the long-form videos you create and, with a little bit of editing, you have an excellent podcast episode ready to post!

Keep creating!

Whatever content format you’re currently producing – blog posts, social posts…whatever – keep doing them! We aren’t suggesting that you stop those just because other content is getting better engagement as a category.
But it’s important to be nimble and test popular formats when you see the market’s attention shift, and these formats are working.
Create a plan to start testing these formats now!