Why You Should Split Your Instagram Videos

Post your videos to Instagram can be a frustrating thing - mainly because of their time limit - currently set at 60 seconds.

That’s right - 60 seconds for a video can really limit your message, and if you’re a millisecond over then the platform won’t let you post.

So what can you do about it? Simple - split or cut your post and use the multiple image/video feature. But when you do this what should you take into consideration?

Why Use the Multi-Image Post?

Firstly, using the multi-image post feature in Instagram will actually mean you can post your video. So that means all your hard work can actually go out - which is, obviously, great news - there is nothing worse than not being able to get your message out to the maximum amount of people.

But there are a couple of other reasons too.

Increased Exposure

The main one being that Instagram will treat the multi-image (or in this case video) differently to a normal post. It’s common for users to scroll the platform, but with a multi-image, the platform actually thinks that you might not have seen a post - because it’s been a hidden image - so therefore, it will actually rotate the images, and show it again.

So effectively - using the multi-image will help ensure a ‘2nd chance’ showing of your media.

Tips for using Instagram’s Multi-Image

Let’s run through a couple of tips for splitting your videos and using the multi-image function of Instagram.

Consider where you make the split

Firstly, consider where you split your video. Say you’ve got a 70 second video - so it’s 10 seconds over the limit. There’s a couple of options that people would normally take; 1) you could split at 60 seconds leaving 10 seconds remaining or 2) you could split at the 50% mark - so 35 seconds.

But there’s a couple of things to point out here with both methods…

If we spit at 60/10s - then what does that 10 seconds leave us with as a viewer to watch should it come up in our feed? And with the 35/35s split - whilst this gives the viewer more context - because there’s more to watch, but does that automatic 50/50 split mean we’ve cut our story, our message, halfway through a shot or key piece of audio?

Cut where it still makes sense

So instead, we need to consider where we make our cut.

Making sure that we provide enough context, that should someone pick it up on the 2nd, or 3rd post, it still intrigues them enough to watch the others, but also so that we don’t cut our story/message in a strange place.

And we could also consider cutting so that it creates intrigue. Cutting like a mystery piece could make for some very interesting media.

Let’s wrap this up

Splitting posts on Instagram can really help bring value to the media you’ve shot - helping them to get out to more people…. but if really want to harness the power, you need to be considerate of where the cut is made.

As ever, I hope you’ve enjoyed the episode. If you have any questions please feel free to get in touch.

Until next time,

Beard Out