Repurposing Long-Form Content into Short-Form Videos: A Beginner’s Guide

Short-form videos typically achieve 2.5x higher engagement than long ones. You can reuse long-format video content (video content in general is very reuse-friendly). They include product tutorial videos, customer testimonial videos, short-form videos like TikToks and Reels, webinars, podcasts, subject matter expert interviews, and event live streams. This technique allows breathing new life into those videos by converting them into smaller, bite-sized clips for other media channels.

The repurposing process is divided into parts of curation and editing. The effort dedicated to editing is 20% and to curating the video is 80%.  In curation, you carefully select the relevant content from long-form videos to make it more digestible. While in editing you polish the curated short-form videos to make them look perfect. 

Different Ways to Repurpose Video Content

1. Convert long videos into short-form videos by breaking down interviews, podcasts, or live streams into bite-sized snippets or reels for social media. 
2. Turn UGC videos into website social proof by embedding user-generated videos or testimonials on your website to enhance credibility and drive conversions.
3. Transform customer stories into case studies by adapting video success stories into written case studies, making them more accessible while improving SEO.
4. Create GIFs for emails by extracting key video moments to create animated GIFs that add a dynamic touch to promotional emails.
5. Cut podcast soundbites for social media and share impactful moments or teasers from podcasts to captivate audiences on various platforms.
6. Use testimonials as social media ads by curating customer testimonials or influencer content into ads that build trust and effectively showcase your offerings.
7. Make teasers for events or episodes by editing existing content into enticing teasers to promote events, product launches, or podcast episodes.
8. Produce multiple short-form videos from one footage by repurposing a single video into several micro-content pieces to expand reach and engagement.
9. Turn tutorials into how-to guides and reformat video tutorials into written guides, making them easier to reference and share.

How to Curate Long-form Content into Short-Form Videos

The curation of long videos is done by researching the trends on social media and by knowing your target audience. Let’s explore how these two steps work;

 Analyzing the Trends in Social Media

Grab a good sense of trending topics on social media. Check out trending hashtags or keywords as this content is more likely to be shared and engaged with. Analyze your video content with that trend. Touch up your video with texts and image overlays according to that trend to make more audience relate and engage with your videos.

Your Brand Strategy and Audience Type

After analyzing the trending topics and your relevance with your video, understand your target audience. Knowing your audience demographics, interests, and pain points will help you stay informed about the tone you use to deliver your message and aesthetics in the overall video. Your short video is you directly speaking to your audience and thats why it should be consistent and perfectly aligned with the values and aspirations of your audience. 

After analyzing, to repurpose your long video into shorts, break the video up into smaller chunks. However, instead of making the shorts a continuous form of a long video, repurpose each short in a way that it can stand on its own.

Make Chapters

To clip the videos into segments, reimagine a long video and identify the content pillars. By content pillars, we mean the main theme or idea of the video. Break the video into chapters based on the main theme to make it more engaging. Among these chapters choose the content parts with which your audience engaged the most or the ones that can stand on their own still providing the context of the video. 

If you are unsure about which type of content to go for, then choose topics about people’s desires and goals, teach valuable tips and hacks, content about people’s mindset, and the general issues they face in everyday life and how to solve them.

Discover Your Ideal Platform

It is one of the most important considerations as different platforms have different requirements and you have to tailor your content according to their specific needs. For instance, on TikTok, it is allowed to make a video with a maximum length of one to ten minutes while on Instagram and YouTube, the maximum length of the video is 60 seconds. So understand the limitations of each platform and create short-form videos accordingly. 

A 5 Steps Process To Repurpose Your Long-form Content into Short Videos

1. Select the Video to Re-purpose

Select the longer video tha you previously posted on the YouTube channel to repurpose it into micro pieces of content. To create these micro pieces choose a video with a few obvious points to easily break its structure into shorter videos. 

If your video has some main ideas then divide that video into separate shorts that cover each idea and here you go with YouTuber separate videos that cover each idea. In that way, you can create several short-form videos from a single long video. 

1. Duplicate the Long Video and Trim it For Shorts

After selecting the long-form video make a copy of the original version and then edit the copied video. Split that long video into multiple short-form videos. There are multiple tools available for that purpose. Select the places where you want to trim the video and trim it to the section you want for your first micro-video. Following the same steps turn the remaining into micro-videos for shorts. 

4. Optimize Your Video for YouTube Shorts

After trimming the video into shorts, resize them and optimize them to make them adjustable to use for multiple platforms. Ad transcriptions, captions, logos, brand colors, etc to make them more eye-catching.

5. Download Your Short-Form Videos

Select the trimmed and optimized videos and download them on your computer or device. Once you’ve completed trimming, editing, and optimizing your short-form videos to align with your goals, the next step is to download them to your computer or device. This process ensures you have the final, ready-to-use files accessible for uploading, sharing, or archiving.