Facebook Has Some Tips for Journos on How to Use Instagram’s New Video Capabilities

As you may have heard, Facebook-owned Instagram just unveiled video-making capabilities. Like Twitter’s Vine, Instagram videos allow users to create short, edited videos and share them on multip...
Facebook Has Some Tips for Journos on How to Use Instagram’s New Video Capabilities
Written by Josh Wolford
  • As you may have heard, Facebook-owned Instagram just unveiled video-making capabilities. Like Twitter’s Vine, Instagram videos allow users to create short, edited videos and share them on multiple social media platforms. There are a few differences between Instagram Video and Vine, however – mainly that Instagram Video allows for 15-second videos (Vine does 6-second clips) and it also allows users to filter their videos.

    We already know that Instagram Video is going to be used in plenty of marketing strategies, but Facebook wants to let journalists know that Instagram Video can be a great tool for them as well.

    Here are Facebook’s tips:

    How you can use Instagram Video in your reporting?

    1. Share Breaking Behind-the-Scenes News Clips: Video on Instagram will enable you to capture short video clips and share them with your followers from the scene of your reporting, giving them a behind-the-scenes look into the news event.
    2. Covering Breaking News: This enables you to find footage captured by the citizenry from news events to get a better understanding of the story.
    3. Crowdsourcing: Utilize a hashtag and prompt your community of viewers or readers to share videos from a news event with the hashtag.
    4. Promote stories: Use short video clips to tease stories you’re working on by sharing a preview.

    Of course, if you’re a new organization, sharing Instagram Videos on Instagram itself has its limitations. For reporters to really be able to use Instagram Video to help tell a story, one would think that the videos would eventually have get embed capabilities – something that Vine did back in March.

    Plus, Instagram Videos have one major impediment – their inability to be shared on Twitter. Sure, you can share the link to Instagram Videos on Twitter, but ever since Instagram chose to bow out of full Twitter card integration, Instagram content cannot be fully displayed inside of Twitter.

    What do you think? Can Instagram Video challenge Vine is the realm of short, user-generated video?

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