Generate social-media-ready images and scrolling video from your story, ready for you to download and share.
Posting about your story on social media can be a great way to promote it. Here's how to create images and video at the right size and format for common social channels, then download them, ready to post.
From the story card on the Shorthand dashboard, choose "Promote" from the pop-up menu.
Or from the story editor of a standalone story (this option won't be available for stories with a Shorthand Project), choose "Create shareable asset" from the blue PUBLISH button in the top right:
A panel will appear, showing a version of your story title section.
At the top left of the panel is a drop-down menu from which various social platforms may be selected:
Selecting from this list will change the dimensions of the generated image or video to suit the chosen platform. A secondary level of the same menu enables choosing from different aspect ratios and the choice of generating a still image or video.
Choosing between image and video aspect ratios for Instagram
Generating images
The layout, text, fonts, and colours in the image are related to their representation in your story title section, though they have been modified to suit the chosen social platform and its formats.
The differing formats may mean that the image will look best with some light editing. Clicking on any of the text blocks in the image enables re-sizing and repositioning the text blocks. Drag the handles at the ends of the text blocks to change their width, or click and drag the whole text block to reposition it. It is also possible to click within the blocks to edit the text directly.
Your image doesn't need to include the same text as your story. You could, for instance, create a promotional image that includes the title and some text that directly asks visitors to "Read our latest story".
Changes you make in these images do not affect the text in your story. However changes in the story editor to the title image and text, size, and colours will affect those attributes the next time you use the promotional image/video generator.
Click on the green DOWNLOAD IMAGE button below the image area in order to save the image to your computer, ready for you to post to social platforms or send via email etc.
Generating video
Creating a video that shows the story being scrolled is no harder than creating a still image (it just takes a little longer to generate).
⚠️ Please note: After a video has been successfully generated you can download it immediately and it will also initially be available for re-downloading from the DOWNLOADS page of the social video generator panel. However, if you subsequently make any edits to the story, any previous downloads will no longer be available, so be sure to hold on to the downloads on your device for safe keeping, or else you may have to regenerate a new video.
From the content panel, choose a social platform, and from its secondary menu, pick one of the video options. Some platforms may support multiple video options such as square, portrait, and landscape video, while others may have only one option.
Choosing the 'Story video' option for Facebook.
After choosing one of the video options, the screen will change to show an example of scrolling video and provide some controls for setting aspects of the video you are creating:
Example video and controls.
From the controls, it's possible to set a combination of the length of the generated video, and how much of the story is shown scrolled over that time:
Settings for video length and percentage of story scrolled
The combination of these settings will determine how fast the story appears to be scrolled. The longer the duration and smaller the percentage of story scrolled, the slower the scroll will be, and vice versa. If your story is long, it is probably best to choose a smaller percentage of the story to include in the video: the purpose is to give a 'sense' of the story, not to create a video from which people can actually read every word.
Click the green 'Create Video' button, and the system will work in the background to generate the video. During the generation of the video, you'll see a status message. The video generation process can take a bit of time, so you can leave the screen at this stage and come back to download the video later if you wish.
Generating your video
After generation, you'll see a preview of your video, and can choose to download it using the green "Download Video" button:
A generated scrolling story video
Don't forget to share the images you create with colleagues so that they can post them to their social networks too.
Note: The images you create with this feature aren't included in your story or posted to social networks automatically: that's up to you!
These images differ from those used when your readers share the story on social networks. To set or edit those, use the SOCIAL tab in the editor.