When you have been scrolling through social feeds recently, you will realize one thing at high speed: short vertical videos are ubiquitous. Reels, Shorts, and Stories have altered the way individuals find, respond to, and share content – and if you are promoting in Nigeria, you may not overlook that transformation.

In layman’s terms, How Video Dominates Engagement: short videos get attention, prioritisation by the feed algorithms, and cost less to make compared to large reach.

This article will take you through step-by-step reasons why these formats work, how to do them effectively, and strategies you can actually employ this week with examples based on campaigns that I have managed in Lagos and other parts of the world.

Step-by-step guide on How Video Dominates Engagement

Step 1 – Learn about the attention economy.

We now read people more briefly than before. Minimal videos are successful due to their alignment with our diminishing attention and platform presentation of content.

The short video formats are reported to have a high ROI by marketers and are among the many that teams have plans of using by 2025. This is why you encounter feeds full of 15-60 second videos that have stopped thumbs.

Step 2 — Select the appropriate format of the moment.

Discovery machines: Reels and Shorts are excellent in terms of awareness and virality. Anonymous and unfolding are stories best suited to announcements or background information. Stories should be used to recall people who are already familiar to you, and Reels/Shorts are to attract the attention of new users.

I did a 20-second Reel to announce a Lagos pop-up event, and the ticket page experienced a 30 percent spike in 48 hours of the clip going viral in the area.

Step 3 — Hook fast, provide value faster.

Your first 1–3 seconds matter. Employ captions (many Nigerians do not watch with sound to save data), obvious visual cues, and one powerful idea per video. Demonstrate a product advantage, promote a smile, or teach one little thing.

Social media sites incentivize high watch-throughs — the more you view, the more the algorithm will pay to promote you. Meta and other platforms have placed heavier ads and prioritisation of Reels and short formats, which makes optimisation here worthwhile.

Step 4 — Repurpose ruthlessly

Create a piece of content, then cut one longer piece (a tutorial, interview, or explorer) into several Shorts/Reels and Stories. You receive both the rich content that you can get from the visitors of your site and the quick bursts that are the engine to discovery. In my case, one 6-minute product demo resulted in five product clips that pushed over fifty percent of all the demo views in that month.

Step 5 — Localise and test fast.

The Nigerian viewers are urban and linguistic. Experiment with Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt hooks and captions, and quantify engagement per naira expended. The 2025 social trend reports focus on experimentation and creative risk, i.e., try something bold, listen to what works, and do more of it.

Conclusion

How does video dominate engagement? The video formats used in short are in line with user behaviour and platform incentives: they are fast to consume, simple to distribute, and algorithms promote what people watch. A lot of projections and marketing predictions predict that in 2025 the majority of social consumption will be short video – it is a market trend that you just cannot overlook.

The following is a 5-point checklist that you can utilize this week;

• Produce one 60-90 minute pillar video (describe a problem and a solution).
• Divide that pillar into four 15-30 second reels/shorts having different hooks.
• Post 2-3 Stories that day you post to attract your current followers.
• Add captions and put on sound off – the majority of the viewers like that to save on data.
• Watch-through rate, shares, and clicks per naira, repeat the best performing cut.

There is a fast anecdote that I received when I, at first, suggested to a little restaurant in Lagos that they should try Reels as they believed that it was costly to create videos. We shot on a cell phone, had one call-to-action, which was to book now, and in a week, their busiest night doubled. It was not magic but it was the right message in the right format and presented to the right people.

Last piece of advice: do not be dogmatic. Reels, Shorts, and Stories are the engines of short videos, although not every goal can be achieved with them (longer tutorials and case studies can still be useful), discovery, brand energy, and rapid engagement should be achieved with the help of short videos. Test it fast, go small, and have the engagement data tell you what type of style works in your market.