The Best Boss: Twitter Video Limit and how to bypass it

Thursday, October 1, 2020

Twitter Video Limit and how to bypass it

Video has been thriving in social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tik Tok for the last couple of years. With that in mind, it’s only logical that you want to upload videos on Twitter, yet you’ll be surprised because the time limit for a video is way lower than other platforms.

Contrary to other platforms were you can upload 20-40 minute videos, Twitter has restricted its platform to just 140 seconds, just as they used to limit their tweets at 140 characters 😉

That’s equivalent to 2 minutes and 20 seconds total, which means you need to be very careful with what you upload in order to fit all the content and ideas inside that time limit.

Will they change it to 280 seconds now that they have doubled the text limit? Who knows for sure…

Besides that, Twitter has the following video limitations in terms of resolutions and aspect ratios:

Minimum resolution 32×32 (potato quality)
Maximum resolution 1920×1200 (horizontal) or 1200×1900 (vertical videos)
Aspect ratios: 1:2.39 – 2:39:1
Maximum frame rate: 40 fps
Maximum bitrate: 25 Mbps
Maximum file size: 512 MB
Supported formats: MP4 and MOV

As you can see, the limits on video are quite different to Youtube, for example, where you can upload 4K or 8K video recently at 60 FPS and different aspect ratios.

That’s just the way Twitter works and there’s not much you can do about it. If you upload videos directly from Twitter you’re going to need to cut them to 2 minutes, 20 seconds. This isn’t that bad considering most people Tweet from their phones where 4K or 8K are not needed, but Twitter’s time limit can be frustrating at some times.

How to bypass the 140 second Twitter video limit

There are 2 ways to bypass the video limit and show longer videos to your Twitter audience.

Uploading to YouTube

One is very simple and I wouldn’t really count it as an option, yet it works for some people so we might as well mention it: upload your videos to Youtube and post the link in your Twitter account!

Yep, it works and you can upload longer videos and share the link. Twitter will automatically create a card with the thumbnail of your YT video and it will get a decent CTR, however, this isn’t the best way to do it.

Also, you might reach fewer people as you’re not keeping your audience inside Twitter, and Youtube isn’t widely used for vertical videos, in case you’re uploading vertical content.

If you still want to upload longer videos without linking to an external property (possibly owned by Google) then there’s a second option.

Use Twitter Media Studio

Who would believe it? Twitter has a tool that allows you to upload videos up to 10 minutes long!

Twitter Media Studio is a platform to manage, measure, and monetize your Twitter videos. It’s just an easy way to organize and upload any media content in general, including images, GIFs, and videos. It also allows you to add captions, titles, or setting thumbnails for your videos, which is awesome and would definitely help you get more views per video.

You need to log in from a computer or browser to get access to it. Just go to your left menu and select “more” then go to “media studio“.

You’ll find all of your media from the logged account in there, and you can upload any video as long as it’s an MP4 or MOV. After the upload is over, you can edit your video by adding a thumbnail, subtitles, etc.

Once you’re done, just click on “tweet the video” and schedule your video or publish it right there.

Problem solved.

If you can’t see the “Twitter Media studio” option in your menu you might need to access your Twitter ads account for the first time and go to the “creatives” tab and then go to “media“. This will connect you to your Media Studio and enable that option for you on future occasions.

Enjoy your 10-minute videos and keep uploading interesting content for your audience.