Dive Brief:
- After offering only a square format for sharing photos and videos, Instagram will soon introduce landscape and portrait formats.
- Most social networks already permit the more traditional vertical and horizontal formats, and one in five photos and videos posted to Instagram don’t fit its square mold.
- Among the major social networks, only Vine will still offer a square format exclusively, in keeping with its largely mobile user base.
Dive Insight:
Just as different film formats defined the final product before digital photography, Instagram’s square-only format has long forced users to adhere to its constraints, giving the platform a distinctive look. But soon, Instagram will support photos and video posts in horizontal and vertical formats, which may undermine that distinction while helping open the network to cross-platform campaigns.
Movie trailers are a natural fit for widescreen treatments, such as the first horizontal video to appear on Instagram, a trailer for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. And with retail marketers seeking to provide seamless experiences across media platforms, Instagram will mesh more completely with its parent, Facebook. The move could also speed adoption of vertical video, which Snapchat and YouTube already support.