Last week Instagram, the popular photo-sharing social media site, announced that it’s inviting a new medium to the party: video.
Video sharing on Instagram will work much the same way that photo sharing works. You snap a video on your smartphone (up to 15 seconds in length) and then have a number of filters to choose from to enhance the appearance of your creation. Finally, you hit share and your clip is instantly whizzed out across the social media universe.
This is a useful development for organizations looking to showcase their stories in film. Fifteen seconds doesn’t allow you to share an entire microdoc, but you can easily capture snippets of the important work you’re doing in the field and then share those clips with your audience.
You can also record a 15-second trailer of a microdoc and link to the full film on your website. This will require some work, as you can’t currently import trailers to Instagram (all videos have to be taken with the in-app camera on a phone). Hopefully Instagram will add this capability soon. In the meantime, you can use the workaround of filming the trailer off of your screen with your phone.
We like Instagram better than Vine, the video sharing service from Twitter, because Vine only allows you to record six-second films, and nine seconds makes a big difference in clips this short. Also, Vine requires you to loop videos, whereas Instagram plays through once with the option to replay. Finally, Vine has 13 million active users compared to Instagram’s 130 million.
If you’re not an Instagrammer already, consider creating an Instagram account as a new channel to increase the distribution of your short films.