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Video clips from your podcast are a great way to have that content go further. Firstly, to promote the podcast episode but also to share the content standalone. The standalone pieces can work great to share knowledge with your target audience without a real call to action. (That’s quite okay from time to time.) Many soundbites can stand on their own, and one place to publish them is Instagram. So the question arises: How to make podcast clips for Instagram?
Easy breezy. Let me show you.
Keep in mind that you can publish two different dimensions on Instagram:
- Square – for a traditional post.
- 9×16 – for a Reel or a Story.
I prefer the second option, as Reels seem to do better for me than traditional posts. But you can easily resize clips in this process anyway, so you can decide along the way.
To get started, I grab the URL from my YouTube live stream. I stream all my episodes to YouTube, LinkedIn, and X. If you don’t, you can also upload your video file using this step. Head on over to Opus Clips and get started. Opus Clips is an AI-powered video editing platform that grabs a dozen or so clips from any source video based on what’s being said and keywords that you can set. From there, you can edit further.
I have templates set up for my most common types of video and also changed the color of the text to the brand colors of my podcast – “The Business Storytelling Show.” You can set this on a video-by-video basis, but it’s certainly easier to do it on the template level before uploading. I would recommend choosing another font as well so your videos don’t look like everyone else who uses Opus Clips and who didn’t update those settings away from the default font.
Once that’s all done, Opus Clips will process the video and spit out a number of clips, which looks like this:
I hardly ever pay attention to the score or even the explanation. I just click into it – the edit pencil icon. Then, I read the text to see if I like the content. You can edit the video on the next screen by editing the text. Options include:
- Automatically removing filler words
- Setting the start of a clip
- Changing the ending
- Deleting sentences and words in the middle of it all.
Once in the clip, it looks like this:
You can edit the text right there.
On the design screen (button on the middle right), you can change the video dimension, update the caption design, and place it in different locations.
I use these same clips on TikTok as well and as YouTube Shorts, which allow me to link the live stream video for further promotion. Overall, Opus Clips has made this process way easier for me than it’s ever been.
Once you have the clips finalized, just download them and you can even upload them to Instagram in your browser. I find the functionality on the iPhone a little bit easier so sometimes I email them to myself as well.
