13 min read
Here’s what I’d tell every climate organization heading into 2026 about short-form content (that actually connects).
Recently at The Good Wave, a Belgian network for climate action, I co-facilitated a session on How to tell better climate stories using short-form vertical video. That’s the kind you see every day on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.
Our room was packed with climate professionals, campaigners and storytellers who all wrestling with the same challenge: How do we cut through the noise without losing our integrity or boring people with climate content when they are doomscrolling?
We used the session to show what actually works, and to help them (and now you) build a video workflow that still makes sense in 2026. This entry is a recap of the biggest takeaways we shared and what I’d focus on if you’re using short form video for climate action.
We focused on three platforms: Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.
All of them use vertical video. All of them love strong hooks. All of them feed content based on what the algorithm thinks you’ll watch. But under the hood, they each care about different things.
A simple mental model I like to use when teaching creators is this:
For climate creators and organisations, that difference really matters. Here’s a bit more info on each of the algorithms:
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TikTok runs on a mostly pure interest graph. It doesn’t care much who the user follows → it cares what they actually watch.
Every new video is tested in the background with a small “seed” audience of strangers. If that group stays, maybe even re-watches, and doesn’t swipe away, the video gets pushed further. Here it’s about the time the audience spents with each video. Retention and re-watches are stronger signals than likes, for example.
The trap here is thinking follower count will help you. A million followers doesn’t guarantee views if the first few seconds aren’t hooking your audience. On the other hand: if you know what you’re doing, you don’t need a following to start getting eyeballs on your content.
The best reference for TikTok I’ve found is this: treat every TikTok like you’re performing on a street corner to busy strangers. Only what happens in that moment counts. Not the name of your brand, nor the reputation you’ve built.
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Instagram Reels is a hybrid. It still uses interests, but it acts much more like a network or “friends sharing with friends” algorithm. When you post reels it goes to your followers and to new people, but what Instagram really loves and rewards is content that gets sent in DMs.
“Shares per reach” is the metric that gives a positive signal: when someone sees your video and immediately thinks, “I have to send this to my friend,” the algorithm takes that as proof of relevance.
At the same time, Instagram is still more aesthetic- and status-sensitive than TikTok. Completely chaotic, unpolished content tends to do worse here. So on Reels, your job is slightly different: design stories that feel like a little “this is us” moment between two people, and make them visually clean enough that people aren’t embarrassed to share them.
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