Is keyframe animation the next big trend?
Internet solopreneurs have been leveraging the new trend of animations to grow their personal branding. What about you?
“Attention must be earned in an instant”, said Principal Analyst Paul Verna, speaking on Insider Intelligence’s “Attention! Trends and Predictions for 2023”.
According to a study conducted by eMarketer in 2022, we see that the majority of users of Snapchat and TikTok are Gen Zs, at 50% and 44% respectively. This is followed by Instagram at 31%. To the right of the visual below, we can see the optimal duration for an ad to last on each platform to capture Gen Zs’ attention and keep them engaged — say for TikTok, a dominant ad format would last about 9 to 15 seconds short.
From that we can tell that over the years, there’s a gradual decline in attention span not just amongst Gen Zs, but every individual on earth who has access to the internet. Is this good news or bad news? Is this something we must worry about? What the future of content will be like?
This may come as no surprise, as we see the rising trend of social media usage, especially TikTok and Instagram. We are seeing many types of content on these platforms, ranging from short-form videos, live streams, and user-generated content.
But in particular, these platforms have made short-form videos extremely popular—videos which are typically 15-60 seconds long (which right now are the secret sauce for capturing attention quickly — but that’s not to say that every short-form video will do well).
Recently, it has been brought to my attention that keyframe animations are starting to gain popularity. At least for me, the keyframe animations are appearing everywhere on my TikTok and Instagram FYP. Here’s an example video created by Dan Koe which has gotten a whopping 2.3 million likes and 33.2 million views on Instagram and about 900k likes and 6.5 million views on TikTok:
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Keyframe animations (The next rising trend?)
The general sentiment about keyframe animation has been positive based on the growth seen by Dan Koe on his socials and the comments from many of his viewers:
“I knew my content had potential. But generic short form video content (with the same caption style as everyone else) wasn’t cutting it. Over 3 years on Instagram, I had grown to 250K followers with images alone. Then my growth stagnated. So I set out to crack the code. Animations were the key. My following flew to 1.2M in less than 3 months.” — Dan Koe, Founder of Keyframe
But not only him though. Creators such as Justin C Scott, Dakota Robertson, Zach Pogrob are also leveraging keyframe animations to build their personal brands and have also seen a huge leap in their social media followers count.
What you can do?
If you want to supercharge your content with animations, you can check out the new agency started by Dan Koe, called the Keyframe.
To me, I could watch the keyframe animations for hours and hours and never get sick of it. It is what I call a form of “mindless escapism”. I’m sure it’s the same for most of you who love consuming content.
However, as we see this type of content grow and spread all over the internet, it shouldn’t limit us to creating content that are trending. We must understand that consumer preferences change, and we as marketers and business owners have to change as well. For personal branding, do what makes you you. For businesses, do what’s best for your company. It’s a constant evolution that we must embrace. And that’s how we succeed.
Till next time,
Alvis