The Rise of Reels: Analyzing the Communicative Power of Short-Form Videos on Social Media

The rapid growth of short-form video platforms like YouTube Shorts, Meta's Facebook and Instagram Reels, and TikTok has completely changed digital communication and user engagement. This study explores these formats' communicative potential, focusing on how algorithmic delivery, visual storytelling, and condensing affect public discourse, behavior, and cultural trends. Using theories of communication, media studies, and digital sociology, the study investigates how these platforms are used for activism, entertainment, identity formation, and information sharing. This study uses a qualitative thematic content analysis of 50 short-form videos from major platforms to identify important communicative strategies, such as performed authenticity, heightened multimodality, and narrative compression. According to research, these features, which are enhanced by algorithmic curation, play a major role in user engagement and the platform's usefulness for a range of objectives, including digital activism and entertainment. The findings demonstrate that these videos serve as powerful tools of influence and narrative construction in addition to being entertainment artefacts in a participatory, algorithm-driven media environment, calling for revised media literacy frameworks.