How long should a corporate video be?

Because the attention available is not the same from one place to the next, and it is attention, not your message, that sets the limit.

The same person will watch thirty distracted seconds in their LinkedIn feed, three attentive minutes on your website after looking your name up, and twenty captive minutes if the subject concerns them directly. So the question is never “how long can my video be” but “how much attention does my viewer have in this place, at this moment”.

During framing, before the shoot. Never in the edit.

The classic trap: shoot first, decide later. You end up with fifteen minutes of material nobody dares cut, and a six-minute video nobody finishes. The target length changes everything that comes before it: what you film, what you ask the people on camera, what you allow yourself to leave out.

And a well-framed video can live in several lengths: the full version on your website, short extracts for social media. That is a design decision, not a patch applied in the edit. There is more on this in the article about framing.

Too short, without hesitation. Nobody has ever complained that a corporate video was too short.

When in doubt, cut. The feeling of length does not actually come from the running time but from the rhythm: a well-built three-minute video feels shorter than a ninety-second one that goes round in circles.

A video that runs too long is almost never a decision: it is an accumulation. The opening with the animated logo “because we had it made”. The passage on the company history “because it matters to us”. The extra person on camera “so nobody feels left out”. Each addition can be justified on its own; together, they bury the message.

The cure is a question asked of every sequence in the edit: if we cut it, does the message lose anything? If the answer is no, it goes. It is an uncomfortable call to make about your own material, and that is exactly what an outside eye is for: I have no sentimental attachment to your shots.

No, and often the opposite. A well-built thirty-second video takes more writing than a three-minute one.

Cutting down means choosing. Every second has to earn its place, every shot has to carry meaning, and the slightest weakness shows because there is nothing around it to drown it out. That is why judging a quote by the length of the finished video makes no sense: the work is measured by scope (preparation, shooting, revision rounds), not by running time. There is more on this in the article about the price of a corporate video.

One rule of construction changes everything: the essential first.

The funnel structure (context, then details, then conclusion) is an inheritance from writing that does not survive how viewers actually behave: many drop off along the way, at any moment. If your key message arrives at the end, part of the audience will never hear it.

In practice: the promise or the strong idea in the first seconds, the development after, and an ending that rewards those who stayed. With that structure, even partial viewing carries the message, and, paradoxically, people stay longer, because they know from the start why they are watching.

This matters all the more as the volume of video published keeps climbing: according to the LinkedIn study by Metricool, video content published on LinkedIn grew by 53% in a year. Your video is not alone in the feed, and the first seconds cannot be won back later.