How to upload longer videos on Twitter

Everyone knows (and hates) the very famous Twitter character restriction. While the 280-character restriction is annoying in its own right, there are even more annoying restrictions on Twitter. If Twitter is central to your marketing strategy, you might want to learn how to upload longer videos on Twitter.

In case you don’t post videos on Twitter, here is a piece of information: you cannot post a video exceeding 140 seconds on Twitter.

If you have a three-minute ad to share with your Twitter followers that you’ve grown carefully over the years, do you have an option?

Fortunately, you do. In this post, you’ll learn two clever ways to upload longer videos on Twitter.

Without further ado, let’s get into it.

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How to Upload Longer Videos on Twitter

If you’re on this page, you’ve probably tried to upload a really long video to Twitter, and you’re disappointed that you can’t.

If you have more than 140 seconds of video, you’ll need to trim it before posting. Who wants to watch a series of trimmed videos in a thread?

Over the following paragraphs, I’ll show you working ways to bypass the 140 seconds limit, so you can get to growing your business on Twitter as you do on all social media platforms.

Using Twitter Media Studio

If ‘Studio’ sounds familiar, you must be an avid video creator who has used YouTube Studio and Facebook Creator Studio.

Fortunately, Twitter has its equivalent for these platforms acceptably named Twitter Media Studio.

Twitter Media Studio allows video creators to bypass the 140-seconds video restriction, pushing the restriction up to 600 seconds.

Basically, you can upload videos that are up to 10 minutes in length if you have access to Twitter Media Studio.

Furthermore, if you can get a lot of eyes on your video, you can monetize your videos with access to Twitter’s tool for creators.

However, Twitter Media Studio isn’t available to everyone. To gain access to the suite, you must apply and get approval from Twitter.

If all these sound like something you’ll like to try out, here is how to access Twitter Media Studio to upload up to 10-minute videos on Twitter.

How to Upload Longer Videos on Twitter Using Twitter Media Studio

Before uploading a video that supersedes the laid down limitations, you should verify if you can access Twitter Media Studio.

Twitter Media Studio seems to be part of Twitter Advertising, but you can access it without advertising on Twitter.

Here are the steps required to access Twitter Media Studio.

Open studio.twitter.com in your browser while you’re logged in to your Twitter account. If you’re unable to access the studio, you’ll need to access it through Twitter Advertising. If you can access it, skip step 2.
If you’re unable to access the Twitter Media Studio using the instruction in step 1, open your Twitter ads account through the URL ads.twitter.com.

Once you’re at the interface, find and click on ‘CREATIVES.’ This is located at the top corner of your screen. Click on ‘Media’ when it appears and you should be redirected to the Twitter Media Studio.

If you still don’t have access to Twitter Media Studio, you can write Twitter support for official help.

If you’ve gained access (which you should’ve by now), you should see an “Upload New Media” button. This will let you upload a video lengthier than the regular 140 seconds.

However, even with your new access to a plethora of Twitter video features, you still have a few limitations. Some of these limitations include:

The maximum file size is 1GB. If you’re planning to upload a 4k video, Twitter Media Studio won’t work.
The video must be exactly 10 minutes or less. If you upload a video longer than 10 minutes, the annoying ‘trim’ interface will return inevitably.
Only two file types are available at the moment: MP4 and MOV. If your video isn’t encoded in any of these formats, you’ll get an error message.

If you’re fine with these limitations and you’re not uploading 4k videos, Twitter Media Studio will be the perfect option for you.

However, if you need to share a video longer than 10 minutes or larger than 1GB, you’ll need something better.

Fortunately, there is something better than Twitter Media Studio for uploading videos to Twitter. Here is the other option available.

Using YouTube Embed

While you may don’t want your users to click away from Twitter to see your video, they actually won’t need to click away.

When you embed a YouTube video to Twitter, your followers (and every other Twitter user) can watch the entire video without having to open YouTube on their computers (or phones).

Here are the steps required to embed YouTube videos on Twitter to make this work.

Create a YouTube channel

You can only post videos on YouTube when you have a channel. Creating a YouTube channel is fast and easy; just name your channel and boom!

Once you’ve created a YouTube channel (which you already probably have), jump to step two.

Upload a video to the channel

Open the YouTube homepage on your desktop and click on the ‘Upload Video’ button at the top right corner of your screen.

Upload the video that you’ll like to share to your followers and fill in all the other necessary details (description, title, etc.)

Copy the link to the video

Once the video is live, open the video in your browser and click on ‘SHARE.’ Of the numerous options available, select ‘Copy Link.’

Upload a Tweet with the video link

Once you have the link to the YouTube video, open up Twitter and start writing a new Tweet. Write whatever you like as the description of the video and hit ‘Tweet.’

Voila, your video is live on your Twitter profile. However, instead of appearing as a regular link, it will appear as an embedded YouTube video.

This is advantageous in the sense that you don’t have to worry about any video length or resolution restrictions.

Also, your users won’t have to click off to another website to watch your video. However, if they’ll like to do so, there will be an option to open it on YouTube.

The downside to this method is that the video URL length counts towards the number of characters you can tweet. If you’ll be using this method, you should learn all the acronyms out there because you’ll need them.