Share Your Video in the Right Aspect Ratio

You’re in the final stage of your content creation- sharing it! How exciting! To get lots of eyeballs on, and general engagement with your content, be sure that you share your video in the right aspect ratio. Optimise it for each social media channel too. If you are unsure how to do this read on to find out how to publish your content.

What You Shouldn’t Do

Don’t upload your video onto one social media site, and then use a URL to share that video on other sites. For example, if you made content for YouTube you don’t want to then use the link generated by YouTube to share your content on other channels such as Twitter or Instagram. Typically the other social media channels will not favour this and there’s less of a chance your content will be seen. Each platform both prefers and prioritises natively uploaded content.

These days TikTok enables its users to download video content, but they add a watermark to the video. Some people have been uploading these videos created on, and downloaded from TikTok, on to their Instagram Reels. In one respect that makes sense, because TikTok and IG Reels have the same requirements. These are: less than a minute long, and filmed in 9:16 or horizontal aspect ratio. But remember when you download your TikToks they come with a watermark. Instagram, concerned with its viewer experience, claims that IG Reels originally made on TikTok are blurry and low resolution, and therefore make this type of content less discoverable.

Publishing Natively

What does it mean to publish natively? This means to optimise your content for each platform, making the best use of recommended video size, then upload each piece of content to the platform for which it was designed. This is best practice to get higher engagement on each channel. If you add URL or links to your videos, viewers will have have to click on 1-2 links to actually get the video to play. However, if you publish natively, on many platforms the video will play automatically as soon as the user scrolls through their feed.  This ultimately provides for a better viewing experience. Unfortunately, this best practice is not followed as often as it should be, leaving a lot of content unwatched.

When making use of the autoplay functionality, one thing to look out for is muted video. Many browsers play video on mute so as not to disturb the user. Be sure, to remind your viewer to switch on their sound or you can even add closed captions onto the video. This is great user experience for when the video is on mute, but when the user may have some interest in the video, and who may then go onto unmuting the video. Closed captions are also great for accessibility and therefore would widen your viewer base.

What Else Can I Do?

On some social media platforms, you can pin your content to the top of your feed. Prioritising like this would mean your pinned content is the first thing your user sees. This means when someone visits your profile the pinned content is the first thing they see. For example on Twitter, if you create a tweet that contains important information about a product or service launch date, you want this to be visible. By pinning it,  you’re ensuring it is the first thing people see.

All social media platforms are different so you want to make sure your content is optimised for each of them. And being able to share your video with the right aspect ratio. This means you may have to pick and choose which channels you wish to post on. Alternatively, there is software available which allows you to create multiple sized videos at the beginning of your video project, and then supports you to further optimise the edits on these videos for each social media channel. Find out more about Cerebriam Studio here.

If you want to find out more on how to make the best and most out of your content, read our other blogs or visit our YouTube channel here!