Shorts enable organizations to share engaging, vertical layout videos directly in the Employee App or Intranet. This short-form video content helps your organization deliver quick, impactful messages in a format employees already know from social media platforms. Whether you are sharing leadership updates, learning content, or recognition, Shorts make communication more dynamic and accessible. This use case shows you how to combine a Media channel with the Shorts widget to create a seamless video experience that drives higher visibility and interaction.

In this article:

Key Facts | Video  | Steps | Measure Success | Best Practices | How Shorts Look for Users

Problem Statement: Important updates and engaging content can get lost in long articles or crowded news feeds. Short-form video content captures attention quickly and increases content consumption.

Business Objective: Short-form video increases engagement, improves message retention, and makes communication more accessible across devices. This supports stronger alignment and more effective internal storytelling.

Staffbase Features: 

• Shorts: Shorts display vertical, full-screen videos from a Media news channel in a familiar, social-style format designed to boost engagement.
• News: The News plugin is the distribution base for shorts, allowing organizations to create, manage, and distribute posts across channels.
• Media: Video media is the content base for Shorts. Media is well developed across the Staffbase platform, including view metrics and other analytics.

Audience: All employees, especially frontline and mobile workers who benefit from quick, visual communication on mobile devices.

Outcome: Employees engage with short, visually appealing videos, and communication becomes more interactive, visible, and aligned with modern content habits.

You can use this step-by-step guide to set up this use case in Staffbase.

Create a Shorts Media Channel

1. In the Studio, navigate to Content > News.
2. Click Add channel.
3. Provide a name for your social wall.
4. Under Channel type, select Media.
5. Click Save.
6. Under the Contributors dropdown, select which users or user groups can post shorts.
7. Click Save
8. Navigate to the Settings, to adjust the push or email notifications options.

Learn more about creating a channel and news channel types.

Staffbase recommends leaving the channel as a draft until you create and publish several posts for Shorts. This ensures the widget content has more engagement and views as soon as the channel is published.

Configure the Shorts Widget on a Page

1. In the Studio, navigate to which you want to add widgets.
2. Click the plus icon to Add widget.
3. Click Shorts.
4. Select on which types of devices the widget can be viewed.
5. Select for which users you want to make the widget visible under Visibility in the app.
6. From the dropdown, select the Shorts media channel created in the first step.
7. Click Save.

Create Backlog Shorts Content in the Studio

1. In the Studio, navigate to the Content > News > the Shorts media channel.
2. Click Create Post.
3. Upload the Short video.
4. Enter a description.
5. Click Save Draft.
6. Optionally, adjust the publication and notifications settings.
7. Click Publish Now.

Though you are publishing the posts, as the news channel is in draft, the posts are not yet be visible for your users. Once you publish the channel, the published posts become visible.

Publish Shorts Media Channel

1. In the Studio, navigate to the Content > News > the Shorts media channel.
2. Click Publish Channel.

You have published the Shorts media channel. It is now visible to the targeted users via the news channel and the Shorts widget on a page.

Keep Engagement Fresh

Publish Shorts regularly with fresh video content.
Consistent publishing increases engagement and keeps the widget relevant.

Encourage leaders and teams to contribute their own video updates.
Authentic content drives trust and relatability.

Repurpose important updates into short-form video summaries.
Helps reinforce key messages in a more digestible format.

Utilize the Campaigns feature.
Assign posts to a campaign to track performance metrics for continuous optimization.

These are different ways you can track the success of this use case.

Track Content Engagement

• Track views and interactions on Shorts posts.
• Compare engagement rates with traditional News posts.

Content Reach

• Monitor reach across mobile and desktop devices.
• Identify which topics generate the most video consumption.

Publishing Consistency

• Measure the frequency of Shorts published per month with the News tab of the Analytics dashboard.
• Track contributions from different departments or leaders.

Staffbase has a few recommendations to ensure the best experience for your users.

Additional Helpful Information

• Overview of Shorts
• Configuring the Shorts Widget
• Creating a Short