How to Create a Video Link to Easily Share Your Content

How to make your video shareable in 4 easy steps

Whether you’ve created the director’s cut of your new film or you just like to record video clips of your cat making human sounds, it’s easy to send video content to other people online. Just follow these four simple steps.

1. Upload your video to a video-sharing platform. The internet is full of useful platforms that let you upload videos. YouTube is the most popular option, followed by social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Snap. Cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive are another option if you’re looking for more secure file transfer and control over who sees your video. Of course, another way to share your work is with Descript: just click the “Share” button in the upper right corner and choose your desired video-sharing platform. You can even publish to a Descript page that you can choose to share with only certain people.
2. Create a video URL. Most video-sharing platforms make it easy to create links for your videos. In Descript, you’ll get a link the moment your video is published. YouTube and social media sites also make creating a link pretty straightforward.
3. Use a custom link service (optional). The video URL created by your hosting platform will contain a random string of characters. If you want, you can customize the link with URL shortening service like Bitly, TinyURL, or Sniply. These services also offer the option to track the link’s traffic — you can see how often people click on it and where they’re located. This makes it easy to track videos you produce and see whether or not they’re generating interest. If they’re not, it’s OK. We still believe in you.
4. Share your video with the world. You’ve reached the end of the process, and it’s time to share links far and wide. You can put your video URL in a social media post or in an email newsletter as part of a call to action. If you’re only sharing the video with collaborators, you can just copy and paste the link into a text message or email.
   

The importance of compressing your video

If your video will be living on the internet, it is crucial that you compress it down to a manageable file size before uploading it and sharing the link. There are three reasons for this.

1. Social media sites function best with compressed video. The lion’s share of today’s web videos are viewed via YouTube or social media. These sites automatically compress any video that hasn’t already been compressed, but you’ll have the most control over the video’s look and quality if you compress it as part of your editing process. Read more about formatting videos for Instagram.
2. Most people watch videos on their phones. People love to consume video content on their phones, but because phones have relatively limited processing power, they need reasonably-sized videos to keep the streams going without buffering. Plus, if a person chooses to download a video to their phone, it has to be small enough to fit on the phone’s internal hard drive, which is usually smaller than a laptop or desktop drive.
3. Cloud storage can be expensive. If you’re hosting a lot of video content in the cloud, large video files will tend to decimate your allotted hosting space. This means you’ll either have to rent a lot more cloud server space, or you’ll have to compress your video files so they all fit. Depending upon your budget, compressing may end up as the obvious choice. (You can always save the uncompressed files to an external hard drive for safekeeping).