Publishing to social is a way for Vimeo members to share their videos directly on social platforms (Facebook Pages, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn Company Pages, Pinterest, and Shopify Product Pages) from the Video Manager in one easy step. Publishing to social platforms is different than simply sharing the link on those platforms, in that the video is uploaded as a native video, making the experience seamless for your viewers. And since different audiences exist on different platforms, this feature will make it easier for you to track how your video is performing on many of these platforms right from a dashboard in your Vimeo account.
Publishing your videos to social
To start publishing your videos to social, just log in to your Vimeo account, then go to your Video Manager. Once there, select the video you want to share to a social platform by hovering your cursor over it and clicking the "Publish to Social" icon corresponding to it.
Note: You can also click into the video and select the Publish to Social option in the upper right corner of the video edit page.
A box will then pop up with your connected accounts. If you haven’t connected your social accounts to Vimeo previously, you’ll need to connect each platform you want to use. Clicking the “Connect” button will take you to your account settings. Select the social account you want to use, and then follow the directions to authorize Vimeo to publish your videos.
Once you’re connected, you’ll be able to publish videos directly to Facebook Pages, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn Company Pages, Pinterest, and Shopify Product Pages as native videos, while keeping track of their statistics (views, engagements, and shares) from Vimeo. This enables you to see how your videos perform on each platform. You’ll be able to edit your privacy settings in the publish to social module, which means that you’ll always have control over where your posts are shared.
You can also publish your videos to these platforms by going to your videos’ settings page, clicking on the Distribution tab in the left navigation panel, then pressing the Publish button under the section labelled ‘Social’.
Connecting and publishing to Shopify with Vimeo Create
If you are a Pro, Business, or Premium member and already use Shopify, and you would like to create a video for a product in your store, you can get started, after connecting the Vimeo integration to your Shopify account, by clicking ‘Connect Your Store’ on the Create landing page. In the new modal window, type in the name of your store and press the connect button to continue on to log in or register for a Vimeo account. You can then create a video from scratch or use one of our guided templates to help you with the creation process.
We even offer templates specific to Shopify to streamline everything!
* Please note that these Shopify-specific templates will only surface if you’ve already connected your Vimeo account to Shopify.
Once you’ve finished making your video, we’ll generate a preview video for you to review your work.
After the preview has been created, it will become a draft in your Video Manager. If you are satisfied with the video and don’t want to make additional changes, you can click “Add to Videos” and we will begin uploading the video to your Vimeo account. If you’d like to make some changes, just click on the “Edit” button to proceed to the editor. Your draft video will remain available for further editing even after the video is uploaded to your account. To remove drafts, click the dotted menu and “Delete”.
Once the video has been uploaded to your Vimeo account, you can publish it to Shopify by going to the video’s Settings page, clicking on the Distribution tab in the left navigation panel, then pressing the Publish button under the section labelled "Social".
Your published video will always appear at the end of your media reel on your product page.
Note that you can also use the Embed tool to embed the video anywhere on your store/website.
Publishing an existing video to Shopify
To publish an uploaded video to a Shopify product page, go to your Video Manager, select the video you want to share, then click the "Publish to Social" icon corresponding to it.
In the new window, select Shopify from the left hand navigation panel, then locate the respective product from the product dropdown field. If you have multiple products, you can type a keyword into the field to narrow the available options down.
If you haven’t connected your Shopify account to your Vimeo account yet, simply click the blue Connect button to go to your Account Settings where you can add your Shopify account.
Once you’ve added your store’s page, you’ll be redirected to Shopify to confirm that you wish to connect the two accounts. After connecting your account and publishing the video, you can visit your Shopify product page to preview it. Your published video will always appear at the end of your media reel on your product page.
Please note that in order to display videos in your online store using our Publish to Social tool, you will need to use the most up to date version of a Shopify store theme that supports videos. You can find a full list of these supported themes in the Shopify Help Center by visiting this link here.
Once the video is published to Shopify, if you have questions or need help with the Shopify player, you should reach out to their support team.
You can also embed your Vimeo video on a Shopify Product Page by setting the video’s privacy setting to “Public” and following the same steps outlined above. After using the Publish to Social modal window to send your video to Shopify, open a new browser tab and navigate to your Shopify store’s backend. You’ll be able to see and preview your embedded video in your media reel.
Analytics
After you’ve published a video to social, you can go to your Video Manager and navigate to Analytics > Social to see how it’s performing. You’ll be able to check on the following aspects:
- Views (i.e., how many people saw your video and watched it)
- Likes (i.e., how many people clicked the "Like" button on the social platform)
- Comments (i.e., the number of comments left on your video on the social platform)
Please note that on Facebook, analytics will only reflect if the video was shared to a page, rather than to someone’s wall.
Our Video Manager won’t show analytics for videos shared on Twitter, Shopify, or Pinterest unfortunately. You’ll be able to see certain engagement analytics on Twitter’s side however, which will include retweets and likes but not video analytics.
Why publish to social?
Video plays a large role in the way people consume content on social media — wherever you turn, across platforms, people are watching videos. As a video creator, there are many reasons you might want to incorporate publishing to social platforms directly from Vimeo into your workflow.
First, each social platform is different — it has different audiences and people interacting with video in different ways — so in many cases, it’s best practice to publish different video cuts optimized for each platform. This has the added benefit of allowing you to track the performance of each version in its intended environment over time. Publishing to social can also be a way for you or your team to showcase a teaser or trailer for a longer-form video that lives on Vimeo.
And finally, it can also help you make platform-specific decisions about your marketing strategy.
In addition, there are benefits to publishing videos “natively” to each platform — that is, videos uploaded directly to the platform rather than linked to or embedded. For example, Facebook tends to favor videos that are uploaded natively to its platform due to algorithms in place. Features like auto-play for native videos also help with increased view rates and overall engagement.
Restrictions
Please note you cannot publish videos to Facebook profiles. You can still publish videos to Facebook pages. Don't worry — anything posted before August 1, 2018 on your Facebook profile will not be removed! Another note on Facebook: you can only connect your Vimeo account to a maximum of 25 pages at a time.
Similar to Facebook, it is only possible to publish videos to LinkedIn Company pages. Publishing native videos to personal LinkedIn profiles is not currently supported.
When using the publish to social feature, only the video file will be published to each social platform. Other features (such as captions and thumbnails) and Vimeo specific settings such as video privacy, video interaction tools, or any other type of player customization will not be transferred. Additional video features will need to be managed on each individual site the video is published natively to.
Platform Requirements
Be sure to adhere to the specifications of each social platform, so that you can ensure your videos will successfully publish to social directly from Vimeo:
- Aspect ratio: 16:9 (landscape) or 1:1 (square)
- Max file size: 4GB
- Maximum frame rate: 30 fps
YouTube
- Aspect ratio: 16:9 (YouTube automatically adds black bars to their player in order to accommodate different video sizes)
- Maximum file size: 128GB
- Maximum video duration: 12 hours for verified Google accounts
- When you select YouTube, avoid using angle brackets (< >) in the Description field. This can cause the video to not upload to YouTube.
- Aspect ratio: 16:9, 1.33:1
- Maximum file size: 512MB
- Maximum video length: 2:20
- Maximum file size: 5GB
- Minimum file size: 75KB
- Minimum video duration: 3 seconds
- Maximum video duration: 10 minutes
- Resolution range: 256x144 to 4096x2304
- Aspect ratio: 1:2.4 - 2.4:1
- Maximum frame rate: 60 fps
- Need a Pinterest Business account
- Maximum file size: 2GB
- Minimum duration: 4 secs
- Maximum duration: 15 mins
- Aspect ratio for standard videos: Taller than 1.91:1 and shorter than 1:2
- Aspect ratio for max width video: 1:1 (square) or 16.9 (widescreen)
- List of countries where publishing is allowed: https://help.pinterest.com/en/business/availability/video-pins-availability
Shopify
- Video length: Up to 60 seconds
- Video size: Up to 1 GB
- Video resolution: Up to 4K (4096 x 2160 px)
- Video file type: .mp4 or .mov
Replacing or deleting videos
Deleting a video on Vimeo will not remove it from any platforms you’ve already published to. If you need to delete a video, you'll need to remove it from each social platform individually.
Similarly, replacing a video on Vimeo will not remove it from other platforms. If you've replaced a video, you'll need to republish to any social platforms.