How to repurpose one long video into shorts for TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts

A 30-minute video, podcast episode or webinar usually holds five to ten moments that can stand on their own as a short clip. Cutting them out is the easy part. The work is choosing which moments to cut, giving each a first line that makes someone stop scrolling, and fitting each clip to the network it is going to.

Why repurpose at all

A long video takes hours to make and reaches the people who already watch long videos. Short clips from the same recording reach people on TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn and X who would never sit through the full version, and each clip is a way back to it. You also learn something: the clips that travel furthest tell you what your audience actually cares about, which is useful the next time you plan a long video.

Step 1: Find the moments

Watch the recording once with a transcript beside it, or read the transcript alone if you know the material. You are looking for passages that make sense without what came before. Good candidates:

• A clear claim with a reason. "Most people schedule posts at the wrong time, and here is why."
• A number. "We cut our posting time from five hours a week to one."
• A story with an ending. A customer, a mistake, a turnaround, told in under a minute.
• A strong reaction. Laughter, surprise, disagreement between two speakers.
• A how-to in three steps or fewer.

Skip passages that start with "as I said earlier" or depend on a slide the viewer cannot see. Mark the start and end time of each candidate, and aim for more candidates than you need: you will drop some.

Step 2: Choose the length

Short-form networks accept different maximum lengths, and a clip that is ten seconds too long for one network can still be fine for another.

The first column is the ceiling Publedia uses when it publishes to each network (TikTok also sets a maximum per account, which can be lower, and YouTube treats only vertical or square videos up to 3 minutes as Shorts); Bluesky is not on the list because Publedia does not publish video to it. The second column is a working range, not a rule. A good clip is as long as the idea needs and no longer: if a point is made in 25 seconds, stop at 25.

Step 3: Write the hook

The first line of the caption and the first two seconds of the clip decide whether anyone watches the rest. For each clip, write one sentence that states the point or the tension:

• "This is the one setting most people get wrong when they schedule posts."
• "We lost a client over a missed post. Here is what we changed."
• "Three things we stopped doing on LinkedIn, and what happened."

If the speaker's first words in the clip are weak, start the clip later, or put the hook on screen as text.

Step 4: Cut and format

Most short-form video is vertical, 9:16. If your recording is horizontal, you can crop to the speaker, place the horizontal video in the middle of a vertical frame with captions above and below, or keep it horizontal for networks where that is normal (LinkedIn, X and Facebook all show horizontal video well).

Add burned-in captions if people are likely to watch without sound, which on most feeds is often. Keep text away from the bottom and right edges of the frame, where the app's buttons and caption sit.

Step 5: Match each clip to its networks

Not every clip belongs everywhere. A rough guide:

• TikTok and Reels: the most entertaining or surprising moments.
• YouTube Shorts: clips that point back to the full video on the same channel.
• LinkedIn: the practical or professional moments, with a longer caption that adds context.
• X and Threads: the sharpest claim, short, with a question that invites replies.

Write a separate caption for each network. The limits differ (see the character limits guide), and so does what people expect from a caption.

Step 6: Spread them out

Publishing eight clips on the same day wastes most of them. Schedule them over two to four weeks, a few days apart per network, so the recording keeps working for a month. Mixing clips from two or three long videos keeps the feed from feeling repetitive.

Doing it in Publedia

Publedia has a Repurpose step for exactly this workflow, with you making every decision. It is included from the Ultra plan.

1. Upload the long video to Files, then open Repurpose and select Repurpose a video.
2. Publedia transcribes it and suggests moments, each with a proposed opening line.
3. You review the suggestions: accept the ones worth cutting, adjust where each starts and ends, and edit the hook. For each clip, Publedia shows which networks accept a video of that length, so you can see when a few extra seconds would cost you X.
4. Nothing is cut until you accept it. Accepted clips are cut and land in Files, ready to attach to a post.
5. Create a post for each clip in Create post, write a version of the caption for each network from its avatar, and schedule the set across the coming weeks.

The transcription and suggestions use AI, so they count against your workspace's AI budget, and the suggestions are a starting point: you still choose what to publish. See the guides to scheduling TikTok videos and scheduling YouTube Shorts for the details of each network.

A checklist for each clip

• It makes sense to someone who has not seen the full video.
• The first two seconds and the first caption line state the point.
• It is within the length limit for every network it is going to.
• It has captions if the audio carries the message.
• Its caption is written for each network, not copied.
• It is scheduled at least a few days away from the previous clip on the same network.