Scroll through a feed on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, and you’ll see them – plenty of short videos that grab your attention instantly and won’t let you put up your smartphone for hours.
One thing is clear when you open any social media, from Instagram to LinkedIn or X: short videos dominate socials. Viewers swipe quickly, and if a video doesn’t grab their attention in the first three seconds, they move on. For creators and businesses, it means a missed opportunity of gaining additional views, reach, and, as a result, conversions and sales.
But how do you, as a video content creator, meet new audiences without producing entirely new content from scratch?
The solution is repurposing. All you have to do is cut a long original video (let’s say the one you make for YouTube) into a few short videos, and simply upload them to multiple platforms.
How Short Videos Boost Social Media Reach
Short content spreads faster than longer videos because it’s easy to consume and share. Remember those Reels you share with your friends when scrolling through your Instagram feed? That’s the one. Studies show that users are more likely to finish a 30-second clip than a 30-minute one.
Recent Wistia’s research on the State of Video Marketing 2025 shows that shorter videos have higher ER, simply because people watch them till the end. Social media platforms also favor shorter content in their recommendation feeds, which gives your efforts more visibility.
As such, short videos get on average 2.5 times more engagement than long-form videos.
So if you’re creating hour-long podcasts on YouTube, creating long unboxing content or lengthy tutorials, you have a clue of how to promote on TikTok and Reels, repurposing them as a few short clips might end the struggle and attract thousands of new viewers to your content.
Can I Turn a Long Video into a Short One with Editing?
You can, but why would you? Repurposing a long video as a short clip might sound easy until you sit down and open a complex video editing software. Manually scrubbing through an hour-long podcast or workshop to find highlights worth sharing as a social media snippet takes a lot of time. And even when the moments are found, it requires too much time and a bunch of editing skills to manually format them for different platforms.
Can I Just Cross-Post Videos on YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Reels?
Well, technically, you can. Sharing the same content across multiple platforms might indeed seem like a good idea when you have no time or resources to crop them, but that’s not what a platform’s algorithm would love.
As we mentioned above, short videos are favorable on social media. Besides, each platform has its own way to decide if your content is worth seeing by more users. For example, TikTok’s algorithm ensures a video grabs attention fast in order to be shown to you, while Instagram is more focused on visuals. Needless to say, each of the platforms has its own criteria to decide which content to push to a broader audience, such as watch time, ER, and relevance. If you just post the same video everywhere without adapting the content, it might not lead to the outcome you’re looking for.
How to Turn Long Videos into a Short One Easier & Quicker?
There are quite a few ways to have your long clip cut into several TikToks, Reels, and Shorts.
AI Video Cut
AI Video Cut is one of the tools that watches hours of footage for you and automatically, smartly indicates the best moments to turn into a short viral clip. Its AI algorithms analyse and cut your long video into multiple clips, depending on how you want to see the final result.
Let’s see how it works:
1. Open the AI Video Cut website. It works on desktop and mobile.
2. Upload a long video you want to turn into a short one, either drop a YouTube link or choose a local file from your device.
3. Choose the Output type (i.e., the format of the video you want to get as a result, such as an ad, teaser, testimonial, and so on.
4. Select the number of videos you want to crop out of a single original video. 5. Choose the aspect ratio based on your target social media platform.
6. Select the language of your video, so that AI Video Cut can create accurate captions (around 85% of social media users watch short videos without sound).
7. Choose the caption style and click Submit.
At this point, AI Video Cut will start processing and trimming your video. Once it’s done, you can download the result and publish it on social media. If you’re not happy with the result, you can regenerate your videos or edit them in the text-based editor.
Tip: Copy the transcript to repurpose your video as a blog post and use the auto-generated description as a caption for your social media post!
To edit the video, click on the Edit button (see above) and head over to the Transcript or Captions tab, depending on what you want to edit. From there, you can remove just the words that you don’t want to see in the final video or remove words along with the video bits.
Best Practices for Repurposing Long Videos as Short Ones on Social Media
Simply posting clips isn’t enough; this is why presentation matters a lot. To maximize reach, you can leverage these short tips to make sure you get the most out of your clips:
1. Start with a strong hook in the first three seconds.
2. Add captions since many users watch on mute.
3. Keep clips under a minute for platforms like TikTok and Reels.
4. Post consistently to train the algorithm to recognize your account as active.
Wrapping It All Up
Long videos aren’t going anywhere, but short videos complement your efforts and actually help you promote longer content you make, giving it a longer lifespan. So why let a great YouTube video sit untouched after publishing if you can repurpose it into bite-sized clips to promote it further?
