Tweeting a video saved to my PC is a pain, especially compared to tweeting a photo. Is there a better option than uploading it to YouTube then tweeting the link? Anon
There are two ways to approach this. The first option is to upload your media files to a particular service, such as Twitter or Facebook. The second option is to use an intermediary service, such as Flickr or YouTube. The first provides ease of use. The second takes longer because it’s a two-stage operation, but provides more flexibility – and you retain control.
For example, if you upload a media file – a photo or video – to Twitter, then Twitter chooses how to display it. If it doesn’t like the content, it can delete it. If you upload the same file to an intermediary service, Twitter still controls how it’s displayed, but your followers can view the original at the intermediary service, and Twitter can’t delete it. (And if Twitter runs out of cash and closes down, you’ll still have it.)
Further, you can use the file you uploaded to the intermediary service to post the same photo or video on many other social sites such as Facebook, Pinterest or Tumblr. This is less of a pain than uploading the same file several times.
Well, this is true when tweeting photos but a hypothetical question when it comes to videos. Twitter has added the option to tweet photos, and to tweet short (6 second) videos using Vine. You still can’t tweet videos directly, but this feature may be on the way.
Last year, Twitter launched a “Promoted Video” service and, in November, said it planned to add real-time video capture and editing. This year, Twitter user Daniel Raffel tweeted a link to a FAQ about Twitter videos.
The text is clearly aimed at “partners” who use its Video Publisher tool, not at ordinary users. Still, it seems reasonable to suppose that Twitter will eventually support videos directly, because that’s what users want.
Tweeting photos
It’s very easy to tweet photos on Twitter’s terms: just click in the text box, choose “Add photo” and select a pic from your PC. The main drawback is that you don’t know how big it is going to appear, though the longest side will not be more than 1024 pixels. Just checking a few images in my timeline, the expanded sizes ranged from 463 x 616 pixels to 910 x 556 pixels. The originals could have been 4000 x 3000 or whatever.
Since you don’t know how big an image will appear, you don’t know if it will be legible. A lot of the charts, graphs, maps, infographics and PowerPoint slides posted on Twitter are hard or impossible to read. When the image is hosted on an external service, followers can go to see the original, if they want.
Several external services – but not Instagram – exploit Twitter’s API (applications programming interface) to display photos inline in Twitter. In my experience, the most reliable ones are Yahoo’s Flickr, Dropbox and Microsoft’s OneDrive. With Dropbox and OneDrive, you just use the menu to create a link for sharing an image, then paste that into a tweet. Followers who want to see or even download the original image can do so by viewing it on Dropbox or OneDrive.
You can complain that this is a two-stage process, but it depends how you use the external service. For example, some people back up all their “keepers” on Flickr, which now offers unlimited storage. I use Dropbox to sync my Android smartphone pictures to my PC, and OneDrive as a staging post for proper camera pics. If you have this sort of system, using Twitter’s direct upload might be a two-stage operation (download from Dropbox, upload to Twitter).
The hugely popular Imgur is also worth a look. Unfortunately, Imgur images don’t always appear inline in tweets, for reasons I don’t understand, but it works really well for albums.
What about Twitpic? That external service pioneered the idea of posting images inline at Twitter, though latterly it reduced the maximum length or width to only 600 pixels to save bandwidth. Twitpic closed down late last year, unable to compete with Twitter’s direct uploads. Former rival “Yfrog for Twitter” now diverts to Imageshack, while Tweetphoto, Pikchur and Piktor have effectively vanished. That market now looks dead.
Tweeting videos
In its heyday, you could also use Twitpic to post videos to Twitter, and there were a number of competing services such as Twitvid, Twiddeo and TwitLens. As far as I can tell, none of these still works. That leaves three main options: YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion. In each case, you can post an inline video to Twitter simply by pasting the page’s address into a tweet.
YouTube used for the overwhelming majority of videos posted inline at Twitter. But it does have a few drawbacks. For example, YouTube doesn’t do customer service, and your video can be banned or removed for whatever reason, including copyright background music (don’t video your kids dancing to the radio). Also, if your Twitter followers go to YouTube, they will see your video surrounded by “related” (mostly dire) videos, and some of the lowest quality comments on the interwebs.
Vimeo is where people upload their own professional-looking videos rather than bits of TV shows or random smartphone footage. It displays these videos vastly better than YouTube, and in general, its videos get much higher quality comments. You can also charge for videos on Vimeo, but if you’re monetizing ad-clicks, it can’t compete with YouTube for volume.
DailyMotion, a French service, doesn’t have the quality or class of Vimeo nor YouTube’s mass audience, so I’m not sure why anyone would use it. However, some do, and it works.
In the end, YouTube is probably your best bet for videos, but I reckon Twitter will eventually support direct uploads. Don’t give up hope.
