Navigating Social Media Changes: Instagram Updates and Save Time Editing Videos

I don't know about you, but my head is spinning from the whirlwind of social media updates from this past weekend. From the roller coaster of TikTok's (brief) ban to Instagram's new grid layout and the introduction of three-minute reels, there's a lot to unpack. I'll also be sharing my favorite editing tips using InShot to make your talk-to-camera reels even more engaging and don't worry, I've got some viral reels to share with you to inspire your content this week!

In this episode we’ll be covering:

• All the Instagram updates that happened over the weekend and how to make the most of the changes.
• Impacts of the new Instagram grid update and how you might be able to adapt, even if it isn’t ideal.
• I’m sharing my go-to tool for editing short form videos for Instagram and TikTok, plus I’ll walk you through my favorite features!
• How I got my start editing video - you may not have heard this story yet!
• Diversifying content platforms, while you may have a favorite, it’s still good to repurpose content to use on others.

Other episodes you might have missed:

• Episode 025: Why You Want to Use the New Instagram Features
• Episode 029: Tailoring Successful Reel Techniques to Your Niche
• Episode 032: We All Start at Zero: Embrace Storytelling to Connect with Your Community

Links to reels in this episode:

• Reel # 1: Scripts
• Reel # 2: Bodydoubling 

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Transcript

Shannon McKinstrie [00:00:00]:
I am your host, Shannon McKinstrie. Welcome to Good Content, the podcast where I remove the never ending content creation, guesswork and overwhelm so that you can actually enjoy being on social media again and growing your business with what has always worked. Good Content. All right, so who else has whiplash from everything? The past week, TikTok was banned. Then it came back. Instagram gave us a new grid layout. Now we have three minute reels.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:00:37]:
They also announced an editing app. It's a lot. A lot's going on. So shout out to my podcast manager who let me do this podcast so late. Like, it's literally coming out tomorrow. So because there's just been so much going on, I was like, I need to record a new one, so let's talk about it. Just quick, quick, quick. First, we're at the beach.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:00:53]:
So, you know, here for the weekend, celebrating my daughter's birthday, hanging out with girlfriends. And our husbands are all friends too. We've just been having the best time. And I'm like, oh, cool. Instagram just wants to just dump a bunch of new updates. And I'm like, my head is spinning. So let's go over it really quickly because why do they do this us on a weekend, you know? But real quick, the grid change is really upsetting a lot of people for good reason. Well, I'm not someone who's like, cares about my grid a lot, how it looks.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:01:22]:
Let's be real. Wedding designers, you know, artists, graphic designers, photographers, et cetera. A lot of people have spent years perfecting their beautiful grid and woke up to see it completely looking all sorts of jacked up. So for y'all, I'm so sorry, I hate it. For you, it literally, I'm like, ugh. The only solution is, and I did a reel on it, is to tap the three dots on your post and then you'll see an option to adjust preview and you can play around with it. It will add white borders. But does anyone remember back in like 2011, 2012, that was like the jam on Instagram.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:01:57]:
We all would. What would we use, guys? Was it vsco? What was it? We would throw in our photos and make them. Make any landscape photos. We would put a big border on the top and bottom. And like, that was the vibe of our Instagram and it looked all cool. So it's so funny to like, think back on that. That, like, that was the look we wanted. But yeah, so I'm so sorry.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:02:18]:
That's the only thing to do. But Instagram coaches and marketers, like, Myself for years have been begging you guys to switch to vertical photos because we could see this was all coming, that the more reels were getting pushed. And also just to mention how big our phones are these days. You want your content to take up the most space as people are scrolling their newsfeed. So my only suggestion is to make sure you are now switching to vertical completely. Or if you want to continue your landscape photos, just know that they will have that white border. And that's unfortunately the only solution we have as of yet. Like all things, they drop these things on us and we just gotta roll with it.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:02:59]:
Yes, you can be frustrated, of course, yes, we can complain, but there's really not much we can do. So that's the solution to that, and I hope that helps you a little bit. Second thing, three minute reels. I don't want to tell you guys much about it yet because I want to test them for myself and give you guys the data next week. So we'll talk about that. I'll test out some longer reels next week and see what happens. Oftentimes when people are early adapters to a new thing, Instagram gets excited and, you know, kind of rewards you. I don't know if that's the case with these longer reels, but remember, if you're going to do a long reel, make sure it's interesting to watch the whole way through.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:03:31]:
Even when it switched from how long were reels in the beginning really short, Remember? Then they extended to like a minute and whatever. I kept telling people, just because you can have longer reels now, doesn't mean you should make them. Always make sure when you're doing longer form content, make sure great storytelling, or there's an end result at that, three minutes, so they want to watch until the end. Maybe it's a recipe, things like that. So again, don't feel like you have to create longer reels, but if you're someone who could not get your scripts and stories like that, say you're telling a story down to 90 seconds, you're in luck. You got it. So there we go. That's the other update.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:04:05]:
Other update they gave us is that Instagram is releasing a video editing app called Edits, which is great because I told you guys I want to use this podcast this week about editing and little tricks for your videos. So first I just want to say, obviously we can use Cap Cut again. So if you use Cap Cut, awesome. I am actually more of a fan of Inshots and I will of course test out Instagram's edit, once it comes out and all that stuff, I will report it here on the podcast. But for now, if you want to take content creation more seriously, I'm going to beg you to start using a third party app. The Instagram editing features, we just know they're trash and I'm sorry, that's mean. They're just not good. I want to throw my phone into the ocean when I'm trying to edit a reel in Instagram.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:04:47]:
It's just a little glitchy. It's. I don't know, it is what it is, but I never use anything other other than Instagram. I want you to know that for my captions and for text on screen, 99% of the time, it's Instagram, I use the caption sticker, I use the text to put on my screen. But for editing, like a long talk to camera reel, what I do is I take that video. Because my videos, when I do a talk to camera reel, you guys, they're like 10 minutes long because I yap, I pause, I do different intros, you know, I see which one feels best. But what's amazing about Inshot, I can take that 10 minute video of me yapping, throw it InShot, and I tap the clip, and then I tap AI cut it immediately finds all the silences and filler words and things like that and trims them, cuts them all out. So now you've got all these clips and then each clip I will adjust the front of the clip and the end of the clip.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:05:38]:
Because as someone who has worked in editing for years, right, I worked at, I interned at CSpan, worked at CNN. I studied TV production since I was in high school. So editing is something I love to do. Kind of nerdy, but I love it. So I'm very particular about my editing. So even those clips after the AI cut takes all the silences out. I like to trim the front and the end a little bit so that by the time that that clip is there, my mouth is already open and I'm talking. Because let me tell you something, little silences are like immediate exit ramps for your videos.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:06:08]:
You know, our attention span is so short. And usually when we're on something like YouTube, we're usually locked in. When we're listening to a podcast, we're locked in. We're set. When we're scrolling Instagram, it's different, it's a lot more passive. So if we talk to camera reels, you want to trim all this stuff out, right? Get it as short as it can be. And then I'll delete a bunch of other things that I said that maybe weren't really necessary. So is it time consuming? Yeah, sure is.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:06:32]:
But here's the thing. I repurpose my reels. I put them on LinkedIn, TikTok YouTube shorts. So for me, my talk to camera reels, I don't mind spending a little more time on them, right? Plus a lot of things I teach you guys, it's. I can't just teach in a 10 second quick trending reel, right? Ooh, real quick though. Whenever I am doing a silly Trend Like a 10 second or whatever 5 second, all of that is in Instagram. I don't use any external apps for that. So again I'm talking about those talk to camera scripts, things like that.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:06:59]:
So InShot, take all the stuff out withInShot. Second, what I love to do is that first clip when I'm talking, I'll click on that clip and zoom in to add a visual effect to the first two to three seconds of the video. Because again, those two to three seconds are everything. You gotta grab em, right? So I'll tap effects and tap zoom. And then what I want, it says slow zoom. And then what I want you to do, there's a little slider. You want to actually drag it to the left and slow the zoom way down. So it's just very subtle, it adds a really nice effect.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:07:27]:
And then the third thing I do, I like to do a lot of picture in picture. Meaning like it will pop up a picture over my shoulder or wherever. You can do that. In InShot, the icon, it's pip, that stands for picture in picture. So if you want are showcasing a video or showcasing a picture and talking about it and it's right there, you can use pip to do it. And what I also love to do with that is add a little sound effect when it pops up. Or even if you want to pop up some text, maybe you're doing like a three steps too. And you're like every time that next step you say it, you have a little thing over your head that also has text that explains what you're talking about.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:08:02]:
And then you can have a little sound effect. And the way to find that is you tap audio, a little music button and you just tap effects and tap social. The social audio effects are so fun. Here's a couple of them. Ready? So there's three options for keyboard. Here's one, here's two. And then if you want to do something kind of fun, who remembers typewriters and then there's also my favorites are the double clicks and the just mouse clicks. So things like that.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:08:40]:
But that's basically all I do. So it's just three steps to really make your talk to camera reels more engaging and fun to watch. Trim out the silences. And I will say, yes, with Inshot it is free, but if you do want the AI cut, it is 17.99 for the year. But let me tell you something, worth every penny. It will save you hours and that's worth it, right? But yes, it is free if you want to test it out first and then add little sound effects when it makes sense for that. And then the slow zoom, which again is just under effects. So there you have it.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:09:10]:
That is it. As you're listening to this, if you're like Shannon, that actually sounds like a lot of work. Let me just say this. When I was in TV production in high school, I started to go to TV production because I went to a live taping of SNL when I was 16. My mom had a friend that worked at NBC. He actually worked at Dateline. How fun is that? Now it's like one of my favorite shows. But we went to SNL because No Doubt was the guests and No Doubt is everything anyway, as of course I was watching the skits and everything.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:09:33]:
What I could not keep my eyes off of was the producers running around, the cameramen. Growing up as a kid, I always had the family camcorder. I was always creating skits and commercials and things like that. So there was this natural, just like I should go into TV production and I always wanted to direct, you know, all that stuff. So then in high school, I enrolled in a TV production class and I would edit. And I found my favorite part of the process of shooting all that was the editing. I love sitting in an edit bay. And my senior project in high School was a 20 minute compilation video of me and my girlfriends.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:10:05]:
And it was like edited to like Juvenile Dave Matthews Band, etc. It was so funny. It was so 2000s, right? 2000 was the year I graduated. It took me 20 hours to edit that video. Today to get all the footage together would take take a few hours probably, but to edit the actual video, maybe an hour. So when you are like, Shannon told me I need to edit videos, it's actually pretty time consuming. Just remember VHS, Shannon, 20 hours, it will not take that long. What I like to do is if you're busy and obviously running a business and you don't, you're like, Shannon, I don't have time for all this.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:10:36]:
Record the video and then at night edit it, like maybe while you're watching Jeopardy. And honestly, the AI Cut will save a lot of time. It shouldn't take more than give or take. I would say maybe 30 minutes. And of course, there's people that will. You could pay to do it for you. But I'm just telling you, if you want to take this seriously, learning how to edit videos is really, really important. And I will be doing more trainings for these types of things and tutorials on Instagram and beyond.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:11:00]:
So just be on the lookout for that. But those three things in InShot, go experiment with them and you might actually really enjoy it and be a nerd like me and find it really fun. But that's. That's all I really wanted to talk about today, was to help you guys create better videos, especially now that we have three minute reels. Do you need to download the Instagram edits app? I don't know. Let me try it first because it might not be that great, but I can tell you, I can tell you with absolute certainty, Inshot is amazing. And Cap Cut is great, too. Last thing I wanted to say.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:11:26]:
I know the TikTok ban was a little crazy, right? If you use TikTok for business and community and things like that, it's just, it is a good reminder that we never want to put all of our eggs in one social media basket. Pick your golden platform. For me, that's Instagram. What I say golden platform is, is the one that you actually enjoy being on and your people are on. So that's the one you'll probably spend the most time on and devote the most energy to. For me, that's Instagram. And then you take that content that you create on that golden platform and you put it other places where it makes sense. So if that were to ever happen again, at least you know you're not losing everything.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:11:59]:
But it broke my heart to see so many people fearing for their income and everything with the TikTok ban. So I'm glad it's back. I hope there's a full solution soon. But anything could happen. Your account could get hacked. God forbid, right? That's. You're listening to this podcast so that you can create better content and diversify so that if something were to happen, you're not completely screwed. All right, let's talk a couple viral reels before we go to give you some ideas for the week.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:12:23]:
Number one. Oh, look at that. I just opened Instagram. Guess what, Adam Mosseri the head of Instagram just said to prioritize quality over quantity. Thank you, Adam. Because we all know the experts that don't say that, and it's garbage advice. Okay, speaking of quality, let's talk about two reels that are going viral right now that you can do today, tailored to your niche, of course. One is this.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:12:43]:
This woman is talking to the camera. I already sent it to Steph. It should be in the show notes. And she says, I've been saying it for so long, y'all. Let me just set up play ready? Here's the script that I use to guide my kids back to respectful and kind communication when they're having a hard moment first. Okay, why is that so genius? One, she's giving you a script. I tell people all the time, business coaches, therapists, social media managers tell us what to say, which is why people love when I say, here's your hook.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:13:11]:
Here's what to say when you start your reel. Therapist. Here's what to say to your child when. Or here's what to say to someone when they cross the boundary. Business coaches, here's what to say on a sales call when. But not just. Here's what. Here's what I say. Here's what I do.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:13:25]:
Here's the scripts I use. Here's the boundary I set right. Here's what I say when. So there's one of your hooks. I keep saying it. Hooks that are how tos or three steps. They're boring. We want to know it's your tip and from your perspective and that it's.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:13:39]:
And that you don't just teach it. You do it. Okay. That has 640,000 views and climbing 31,000 likes. 14,000 shares. Okay, other idea for the week. This. This is a perfect example of demo.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:13:52]:
And it is her on the floor folding laundry with her child. It's great visual hooks because you're like, oh, they're folding laundry. Like, what's this about? And it says, when you realize your neurodivergent child wasn't being difficult to find or clingy. They just needed body doubling. And so why this is so genius is because she's demoing what the text is implying or saying, showcasing that body doubling is what she's showing taking place. And it gives you a fresh take, a fresh thought, a fresh perspective on it. And then it makes you go, what's body doubling? And then she explains in the caption. Absolutely brilliant.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:14:27]:
So what's something that you can demo in your video. Keep it about five seconds when you realize you just needed to add blank to your blank. So there you go. When your neurodivergent child wasn't being difficult. So it's awesome. The show notes. Those are two viral reels. Simple one's a talk to camera script.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:14:43]:
One is just a quick little five second reel. She has 38,000 likes on this 1.5 million views and climbing because I think she only posted it like a week or two ago. All right, I'll let y'all go. Lots going on. I will report more about the updates on Instagram next week. For now, just keep creating that amazing content. I love you, friend. You've got this.