Posting Custom Vine and Instagram Video
The power of video as an online marketing tool is no longer limited to portals like YouTube, Vimeo or Facebook. Video has found new homes with iPhone and Android supported apps like Instagram and Vine. Increasingly, our PR clients are asking us about leveraging video on these social apps. Instagram recently expanded its service to include videos up to 15 seconds long while Vine was built to instantly upload “shoot-to-edit” videos from your mobile device in quick six-second snippets. While shooting a video with your iPhone and editing it with apps can be fun, the end-result can be less than stellar. The purpose of this blog is to explore the process of down-converting high definition, broadcast quality, custom edited videos and posting a custom edited Vine and Instagram video. Both tech savvy and amateur producers should find this information helpful. I will use this Hillsboro Cotton Pick’in Fair video as an example. Here is the full version. Waco Marketing Firm Helps Promote Hillsboro 2013 Cotton Pickin’ Fair & Texas State Bar-B-Que Championship from E.H. Anderson Public Relations on Vimeo. Instagram The process was intuitive and rather cut and dried. Save your final video to your device’s camera roll and post your Instagram video from there. Easy enough. Simply edit and export a 15-second abbreviated version of your longer video in the iPhone’s .mv4 format. You can do this with an Apple codec or by importing the file into iTunes and then converting there. Update your phone’s library or email the file to yourself, then save the Instagram video in the camera roll. The aspect ratio for Instagram photos is a perfectly square 612 X 612 pixels, so formatting from your original video can be an issue. However, there is an easy work around. The iPhone app, Squaready will take your 4:3 or 16:9 videos and format them, as the name implies, in a square ready to be posted. The end-result is a nice letterbox video with a sleek white border. Save it to your camera roll and then post your Instagram video. It is that easy. Hill County Cotton Pickin Fair Mirrored for Instagram on iPhone from E.H. Anderson Public Relations on Vimeo. Vine The solution to posting custom videos to this app initially appeared to be more complicated. Without “jailbreaking” your phone, you could use iExplorer to effectively hack your Vine account. After connecting your phone to a PC start recording a video on the Vine app. Upload your new video and rename the file within the “tmp” folder. Geez. There has to be an easier solution. After a little more searching I found “VineClient,” a plug-in for the Chrome browser. I had previously connected my Vine app to my Twitter account. VineClient required that I add an email address to my profile and change my password in order to login into VineClient.
Once inside, select the “upload” option in the drop down menu. The client will accept videos in 13 different file formats that are no larger than 5MB and no longer 6.8 seconds. VineClient also employs a user-friendly interface to add your 140 character description complete with #hashtags.
The aspect ratio for Vine is 480 X 480. You can export your video to meet this ratio or simply check the “Keep Video Aspect Ratio” box within VineClient. Like the Squaready app, this will give you a nice letterbox effect. Hopefully, you found this blog helpful when posting Instagram video. Happy posting.