On 20th of June Instagram surprised the photography community with a new addition to its video sharing app: a feature that allows you to record up to 15-second long videos. This is the second new feature in the last couple of months, with people-tagging for photos having arrived in May, showing that Facebook are not going to slow down in building Instagram into a more feature-rich app.

The ability to record video has taken the Instagram community by storm, with the 130 million monthly active user-base sharing over year’s worth of footage within 8 hours of launching the feature.

Features such as this are evidence of Instagram’s further strategy in making the platform more useful to brands – and advertisers. This feature may also pull brands away from Vine, very much Instagram’s intention; many brands on Instagram already have an existing, and bigger, following there compared to Vine.

The 15 second length for videos also suggests advertising to come as this length is exactly the same as a typical television advert – unlike the 6.5 seconds offered by Vine.

Brands not already using Instagram are going to find themselves with some catching up to do.

Recording an Instagram video is simple, and following our following step-by-step guide will make things even easier! As always, have any additional questions? Add them in the comments.

Step-by-step guide to recording Instagram video

Instagram’s video is a series of video clips stitched together and if you’ve ever used Vine, it’ll be highly familiar to you.

1. First of all, be aware that if you don’t have a stable internet connection, you’ll have some difficulties uploading your video to Instagram
2. Place your phone on a flat surface, or at least hold it very still, to minimise movement and shake in the recording
3. Press and hold the red record button to capture a scene
4. Release your finger from the record button to stop recording
5. You can switch between the front-facing and rear-facing camera, and even do this in between clips
6. When you’re ready, press Next and you can then move onto adding one of the 13 filters typical to Instagram
7. The next step is adding a Cover Frame (the frame that will form the still image for the video)
8. Press Next to complete the final step: add a caption, location, and which other networks you’ll share the video

Remember that hashtags are important on Instagram, so use relevant ones such as #instavideos, #videoinstagram, #videography, and #videogram.

The video you capture will be automatically saved to your phone, but for now, you can’t upload videos that are pre-recorded – you have to upload your video then and there. It’s likely this feature will be coming in the future though.

As with all new features like this, it’s a little buggy. We’ve had a video get stuck while ‘processing’, only to never finish, meaning we had lost the video completely. This is why for now it’s important to have a good internet connection!