Using Vertical Video on Social Media
Post by Felicity Whelan, Managing Director – GLUE Content
Looking beyond the Instagram square: Using vertical video on social media platforms
When Instagram was first released, the square crop was its hallmark feature, a marker of every photo that had been posted on its feed. However, in late 2015, the social network announced that they were thinking outside the square, allowing users to share images and videos in both portrait and landscape orientation.
At the time, nearly one in five photos weren’t in the classic square format – friends were cropped out, landmarks were chopped and only half of a plate was included. Those who wanted to include the entire picture used third-party apps to add white space, often making the image much harder to see.
By adding this feature, Instagram endeavoured to make visual storytelling as coherent as possible. In the same update, they also extended filters across every type of media, allowing for visual consistency.
So what does that mean for Instagram posting these days? Lots! However, most pertinently, it opens so many doors for companies to get creative with their videos, embracing the vertical format. With so much more space to work with, it offers an opportunity to tell a richer visual story.
Thanks to Instagram’s changes, as well as concepts like Stories – across Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat – consumers are now used to viewing content without having to rotate their phone. All four of the major social networks – Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter – publish vertical videos with no black borders, enhancing the viewing experience. As such, vertical viewing now accounts for 29% of view time, with ads in the vertical format having up to nine times more completed views than horizontal video ads. 1
videoadvertisingnews.com
This behaviour shift is also partly due to changing social media habits – mobile phones are now the primary social device, with a 13% lead on computers. Those on their mobiles hold their phones vertically 94% of the time, and so find value in media that can be viewed easily and usually, with one hand. What’s more, millennials are twice as likely to focus on a video they’re watching on their phone over a video on TV.
So how can you capitalise on this trend? Embrace the long and narrow! You’ll create a stronger user experience, increase brand awareness and ad recall and have content that can be shared across a multitude of platforms. It’s also just as easy for video agencies like GLUE Content to create and implement into content plans. Why wouldn’t you get involved?
To find out more about how you can use vertical video in Instagram to your full advantage, get in touch today!
GLUE Content is a Melbourne based video content production and animation agency, producing content for some of Australia’s leading companies, brands, agencies and sporting organisations.
- https://medium.com/@jonsteinberg/vertical-video-86a68c45ac06