Why I’m Loving Instagram’s Free Edits App for Editing Reels [Episode 126]

Hi, friends. Welcome back. This is gonna be a super short summer shorts, and today I'm going to be breaking down my new favorite Instagram reels editing obsession, which is Instagram's native. They launched a new app about, I don't know, six months ago, called Edits. It's free. And I actually love it. It has now been like the only way I edit and post reels.

So let's keep it short today, and let's get into it.

Hey, welcome to Holistic Marketing. Simplified. This podcast boils down to the fact that we wholeheartedly believe that more humans need to know about holistic health solutions. And you didn't go to school to learn how to be a full-time content creator and show up on Instagram and do all of this marketing stuff all day, every day.

So let's come hang out while we chat. All things easy in your marketing and my goal is that you shift your mindset around your marketing from a quote should to a I get to more dream patients and clients. Yes, please. Hi, I'm Kristen Spec. And I am a life coach and a sound bath facilitator, meditation and breath work teacher.

And I live in Evanston, Illinois, outside of Chicago. And I listen to Molly Cahill's holistic marketing simplified podcast. It's so great. Okay, so if you are a listener to this podcast and you are like super duper crazy beginner. You don't even know what a reel is. You don't know what a carousel is. You don't know.

You're like, Molly, I don't even really know where to go. Like view stories, whatever. You have permission to skip this episode. I am not saying that it is by any means advanced per se, but the last thing I want you to do is like, Molly, I don't even know how to post anything much less. Edit a reel. But for the majority of you, I think this will be a super helpful episode.

I just taught this in depth with like step-by-step video tutorial. So if you're one of my hub students listening to this, you have a step-by-step video tutorial inside of your virtual classroom portal in the reels classroom section. But I did still want to do a podcast episode on it, even though I can't like show you video and tutorials when it comes to editing reels.

When I say editing reels. I mean things like, you know, we can talk about 'em in two camps. There's either like, you're just normal B-roll, like six to eight, second clip of, you know, you panning your office if you don't know what B-roll is. This is not an Instagram term, believe it or not. Instagram influencers or creators did not invent this word.

It is literally an old school journalism term, as old as time. It is, it just means not as old as time. As old as video and video news was a thing. It just basically means be like secondary footage. It's like when you see a news anchor. Let's say you're watching the local news, which I don't know if anybody does that anymore.

I sure as hell don't. But let's say you're watching the local news and there is a reporter on the scene of the beach and she's talking to the camera and she's talking about there's a shark attack on the beach, and like as she's talking about the shark attack. The video cuts away from her talking to the camera, and the video just pans the beach.

That video panning the beach is B roll. I. So when people are talking about B-roll reels or B-roll ideas or any, when you see that, some people will say be real, that's not correct. It's role. 'cause again, this is an old school journalism thing that has been around well before the invention of Instagram. I actually have a whole episode back.

I'll have to look at the episode number where we talk about old school journalism terms that are being used now when I'm talking about B roll Regals, it's literally just clips like. Your feet walking or you walking, like a selfie type video of you walking or you panning your clinic, or if someone's filming you working on a patient, like that's all just B roll when you're not talking to the camera directly.

That's one main type of reel. And then the other type of reel that I'm gonna talk about is like face to camera, talking to the camera reels. Okay. So when I'm talking about editing reels, why would you need like quote, editing an editing app? It's more useful than, like, if you're just gonna have a six second B roll reel with like one text box on it and that's it.

You could probably still do that or you not probably, you can still easily do that right inside of Instagram, if you're just gonna be posting it right then, um, you can also save that to your camera, roll to post later if you want. That's like fairly simple, straightforward, even though it's so simple and straightforward.

I. I've still been putting those types of reels inside of the Edits app because I just prefer it. And I'm gonna talk about why in a minute. Other type of reel, like talking, if we're talking about face to camera, and again, you can do all of this inside of just like the native Instagram reels interface, but it's just so much more user friendly in the Edits app.

So let me talk about the reasons why and the reason I like the Edits app better. So first of all, if you've been in my audience for a while, you know that I am not the gal to follow for all of Instagram's newest, latest features because often they will like come out with a new feature or do something and then they just do away with it.

Or it's like, okay, this new feature is dumb, and I just don't think my audience needs to know to know about it. Like, I'm never the like, latest, greatest, here's the newest feature, girl. Okay. That's why, like I said, this app, this editing app is edits. App has been out for a while and I'm just now recording a podcast episode on it because I wanted to just like make sure it was gonna stick around.

They got the bugs worked out and it was actually worth telling you about. And it is, well, first step, just go, it's just available at the App Store or Google Play Store. Literally it's just edits. It's like a little black square with like, you'll like, you know, Instagram looking color square with like a white vertical line down the, down the middle, down to the right.

So it's free. Like I said, download that. It will link to your Instagram account. And the reason I like it so much better than editing, right in the reels interface is because it auto saves your drafts. On top of the, I mean, that's just incredible. So you can save drafts right in the Instagram app if you're editing a reel.

But I can't tell you how many times I have like, been working on a reel and then gotten a phone call or my brain will remember something like, oh shoot, I need to text so-and-so back. And I'll just real quick like, swipe out Instagram and forget to like, take that two extra clicks to save it as a draft.

And then all my work is gone when I, when I open up the app. Other times I have saved it as a draft. And when I come back to open it and go to post it, like my text boxes have disappeared or there's just like random glitches. So on the edits app, it auto saves your drafts. You can also name your drafts. So let's say I always recommend, even if you're like a two person show, say it's you as the provider and then like a front desk, even if they're like part-time.

I almost always recommend that you have some type of separate clinic, iPhone. If you're listening to this, you, you're welcome to just DM me. I can send you, um, the link to the refurbished, I mean, I have like seven of these that all the members of team Molly have. It's just like an unlocked, refurbished iPhone that doesn't connect to data.

And you can get an iPhone 11, I think for like less than $200. It's like I could be, I need to look at that again, but it's not that expensive and that's cool because then you have like this clinic. iPhone that can save, like save all these drafts. Going back to the drafts, like as you edit things in the edits app, and I told you it auto saves.

That is not a cloud. Based storage. So say I am gonna use like my one, um, holistic marketing hub student, bright Futures Chiropractic. So Dr. Stephanie's the doctor, Natalie's the office manager, and Natalie is so badass at their, um, social, she is actually the one who I. Went through the hub on behalf of Dr.

Stephanie, and she's the one who's implementing all of this stuff. And now, now I've started going to them as my chiropractor, actually have two chiropractors now. I just bounce back and forth based on what type of adjustment I'm needing. But anyway, that's actually been super common. Recently, I would say the majority of my recent hub students have been, yes, I keep getting a lot of, uh, yes, I have a lot of one man and one woman shows, but I also.

Just get a ton of people who are like going through the hub on behalf of their provider. So even if you wanted to hire like a patient or you know, a virtual assistant, your 20-year-old niece or nephew or whatever, just saying, Hey, can you do my social media? You're not doing them any favors. Way too vague.

If you want to train them how to do your practices Instagram properly, put them through the hub. Don't forget, you can always use the code podcast to save a hundred dollars. So. Okay. Anyway, so I digress. So it is not a cloud-based draft system, meaning, like I said, going back to my Bright Futures Chiropractic, Dr.

Stephanie and Natalie, the office manager story. You know, Natalie has a phone, Dr. Stephanie has a phone if they're both logged into the Bright Futures Instagram via the edits app. Dr. Stephanie would not see the drafts that Natalie is working on on her phone and vice versa. They are device specific drafts.

It's the same like that with just Instagram drafts as well. By the way, another reason I like the edits app versus the just saving it as a draft in Instagram. Now, I haven't tested this, so I don't know, but I, I do know that if you were to update the Instagram app or like delete it and reinstall it, you would lose all of your drafts.

I don't know if that's the case with the Edits app. I mean, my guess is you probably would still lose, lose your drafts, but. Anyway, you can name these drafts in the edits app, which is really cool. Let's say you have this clinic, iPhone for example, and you're like, Hey Natalie, could you be like Dr.

Stephanie, will you review these three reels in the edits app? And like she can hand you the clinic phone and she can like look at the three apps. I mean three apps. Three the three reels. Another cool thing about being able to name your drafts or even like finished reels inside of the edits app, is that 'cause here's another perk.

You can upload really, really long videos into the edits app and you can't do that if you're making your reel directly in Instagram reels, for example, I just went to my family and I just went to San Diego and I have a client there. I have actually like five clients in San Diego 'cause we used to live there.

I got adjusted by my client while I was there and the adjustment video is over 25 minutes long because I told her to like talk through the whole adjustment so we could use that video for her. 'cause we do her Instagram. So I've got this 25 minute long adjustment video on my phone and I wanna use it for my own content as well, right?

I was able to upload the entire 25 minute video. Into the edits app with no glitching, which I thought was so cool. Obviously you're not gonna use that much footage, right? Like I paired it down to just be like a a eight second B roll from the, from 25 minutes. If you were gonna do that, if you wanted to use that 25 minute long video and just use the Instagram reels editor, you wouldn't be able to upload that long of a video.

You'd have to cut it in an outside app, like whether you cut it right in your photos or whatever. Like I just, I love that I, because I did some really interesting edits with it that I also taught my holistic marketing hub students how to do last month. Some like really cool, like progressive, like jump cuts.

Um, I know that sounds fancy. It's not fancy. It's actually very easy to do. All my students were like, oh, that's how you do that. That's so easy. I was like, yeah. But now, because that took me, you know, it probably took me five minutes to make all of those cuts, maybe 10 minutes. But now I don't have to do that again.

Like if I wanna use that same exact video, that same exact eight seconds that I cut down from 25 minutes, again, I. All I would have to do is go into the edits app, duplicate it, and take off the like text boxes that were already on there and add new text boxes and, and it makes a whole new reel. It's also great for like, if you're wanting to test out, like, okay, this message landed really well with my audience.

I want to repost this reel. You can repost the exact same reel easily because you've already got it saved, or you can go, okay, this message landed really well with my audience. Let me just try tweaking. One part of the text box. You can do that super easily. In my agency, we have historically always used the InShot app, which is like 4 99 a month, I think, for more advanced editing.

And now I have actually completely canceled my subscription to InShot as have my team because we don't need it anymore because now we can edit it all in the Edits app. One of the only features I'm missing in the Edits app that I had in InShot. With something called AI cut. AI cut is, let's say you have like a three minute face to camera talking video.

You have a lot of pauses. You say, um, like, you know, filler words, stuff like that. AI cut and InShot would automatically trim out those clips. I don't, there's no feature like that in the edits app, but I found even with the AI cut, I was still manually making cuts to make my videos snappier. Anyway, I. I really haven't missed that feature.

Another reason you would use this app is one of the biggest mistakes when I'm auditing y'all's accounts is you'll have these lovely, amazing face to camera videos of you talking about something, but it quite literally takes you 12 seconds to get into the meat of what the video is about. And so when our clients send us those videos, we ruthlessly cut all of that out.

So if I were like, Hey, fill my face to camera reel. Your natural inclination is very likely going to be to film and post a video that's like. Hey guys, this is Dr. So and so. I just wanted to hop on here today to tell you about a really cool story that just happened with one of my patients. All that's gotta go, like we would literally quite literally cut that entire part of your video out because nobody cares.

You gotta get right into the meat or the payoff, what they call it in journalism. They say don't bury the lead, which means, you know, don't put the meat of what the video is about that far out because you've already lost someone's attention. Even if you do get right into the meat of what the video is about, but you've got a little pause that people jokingly call it the millennial pause on your video before your mouth opens.

So say you're just standing there and you're like, even that little part needs to be cut out of your videos because it is enough to make people scroll past, listen, I know that this is super sad at the state of our world and our attention span, but it's just the truth. And I know that what you have to say is super, super important and impactful and has the ability to quite literally change someone's life if they just were able to see your video.

And the way they're going to be able to see your video is to cut out all of that fat at the beginning and just get straight into something super snappy, which is again, if that feels unnatural to just speak that way. That's where these apps come in handy, right? Because you can still record it as you would like, feel comfortable.

You could still record it with, Hey everybody, I just wanted to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then once you get into the app, you can just like cut it out and it just like, still feels natural for you to record it that way. But you're gonna trim it to trim video Inside the edits app, you'll, uh, use what's called the split clip feature, and it's where you'll just play the video up to the point where you want it to start.

Or to the part you wanna cut and you just need to make sure the video track is highlighted and you'll see a little split clip feature and you just tap that and then you go split it. Like, so say there's a pause, say the video is like, I had a patient come in with Bell's palsy. Pause, pause, pause. And here's what we did like that.

Pause, pause, pause. If you wanna cut that out. You would just split the clip right after you said palsy and you'd split the clip right before you say, here's what we did. And you can just delete that little section. So this is very hard to explain on the podcast. Just open up the app and push buttons. Guys, I don't wanna hear like I'm not good with technology.

Do you know how hard what you do is you went to acupuncture school, you went to chiropractic school, you went to school to be a functional medicine practitioner. You know, maybe you do myofascial release, whatever. That stuff is hard. It's so hard and you can do that. You can learn how to split a clip in, um, edits app.

I promise you just start pushing buttons. I will tell you the very first time I opened the app, it took me about 45 minutes to make my first reel in the edits app be cut up because I wasn't used to it. So just don't be afraid to be a beginner. You will get faster and faster and faster and faster every time you use it.

Okay, so lemme give you another, a few more like benefits. So the Edits app isn't just an editor. You can also go into the app. When you open the app on the bottom, there will be a little like Play Arrow, and when you do that, it will pull up what's called inspiration reels and it'll show you like reels that are going viral that you can use their audios if you like.

There's also a little, um, circle like recording button you can record right in edits as well. So like, I usually record, like already have the video saved on my camera roll, but you can like record right in the edits app, which is cool because me being the vein person, I am, I, there's like a little skin blur feature, um, in edits that, um, will actually blur your complexion a little bit.

Then on the far right you'll see like a little bar graph. And what's cool about that is it will actually tell you what reels of yours are performing really well in the past. So if you're like, Ugh, I'm strapped for ideas today, open up the edits app. Go over to the bar graph, see what has performed the best, and use that as your inspiration and just remake.

Use the same exact headline if you want. Just put a different video with it or something, or do what I do all the time, which is just repost the same video. So that's the, the cool thing about the Edits app is it does have those extra added features. It also has way more font and closed caption options than the Native reels editor at the time.

I'm recording this now. Instagram changes stuff all the time. And when I was recording this tutorial for my students, they were like, some of them were like, oh, we don't have that many font options. Like theirs looked a little different than mine. So, like I said, just know they kinda roll things out like this in waves to people.

You might not have like as many, but like I said, there's more like font options. Please make sure that you choose a font that's easy to read. Don't choose cursive. Make sure there's enough contrast. Those are two. I didn't mean to make this until like real's, best practice podcast episode. I have plenty of those that I've already recorded.

But yeah, you don't want to have like a scripty font that people can't read or not have contrast where people can't read the text or if it's too small or if it's too much, they can't read it. Last thing is, so once you're done editing the reel, the other cool thing is you can actually add the audio. Like you can find trending audios right inside the Edits app.

You don't have to wait until you get into the Instagram app to add audio. And then once it's ready to post, now you can't caption it. Like you can't write the, um, the caption that goes underneath the video. You can't write that in the edits app. So once the actual video itself is done, like you can add the text boxes that go over the video.

But you can't add like the actual caption underneath. What I've been doing is there's an export button at the top right when you go to export your reel. I have been changing it to, uh, it defaults to 2K. I've been toggling to 4K because I have seen from Adam er, a head of Instagram that reels that are higher resolution perform better.

So I have toggled over to 4K and then hit export and it's just, to me, the video looks so good and crisp and like, it's like, dang, was that even filmed on an iPhone? Like it's fantastic. After you export it, it will automatically save a copy to your camera roll, but it also gives you the option to post it directly to Instagram right then, and that's where you'll add the caption.

I've been choosing this option a lot because I've noticed when someone now, well, I should say I did notice, I haven't seen it as much anymore. Let me know if you're still seeing this, but. I've noticed that two things. One, when someone used the edits app, I was getting not just their reel put into my feed, I was getting a notification that was like, so and so used the edits app to post a reel and it was coming up in my notifications, which is cool 'cause it's like, oh, okay, this is Instagram.

To me, when I see stuff like that, I'm like, this is Instagram telling me to use the, use their new toy and we shall reward you. As I said, I haven't seen that as much recently, so I don't know if that's still a thing, but I have noticed that the reels that are coming up on my feed from people I don't follow when I go look at it, look at it, it'll say Made with the edits app.

So I don't know if they're like pushing out more reels that people use the Edits app. Who knows? Anyway, I did not mean to, I said it was gonna be super short, didn't I? My main point of this is do not sleep on the Edits app. If you're, again, if you're a hub student, you've got this full tutorial. If you're not a hub student, just guys go push buttons.

It's not, nothing's gonna happen. Your phone's not gonna blow up. No one's gonna like magically see you in your underwear. Like it's all good. Just don't be afraid to be a beginner and not get at it for a little while. Okay? Like, you quite literally do way harder stuff in your day to day job. Like crazy what you guys do and how smart you are.

If you want, I do have a free resource. It's like 101 reels prompts with like back in the beginning when I was talking about B-roll ideas and then it's got a lot of like hook ideas and stuff like that. You can just go to molly kayhill.com/reels or you can just DM me. Um, reels one, like the number one, not spell out ONE, just like literally reels the number one, like all one word, no spaces.

And it will, and it'll auto dm you my reels free resource. So. Alright, let me know when you use it and then if this wasn't clear, if you have any questions, my dms are always open. I am happy to help. Thank you for listening to Holistic Marketing Simplified, and hey, you know how every podcaster at the very end of their episode asks you to rate and review their podcast.

Well that's because it's super important. These podcasts take a lot of time and heart and effort to produce, to bring you free information. So in order for me to be able to continue doing that, we need more people to find out about the show. So if you could please just take like two minutes out of your very busy day to leave me a rating and share this on your Instagram stories and tag at Molly a Cahill.

C-A-H-I-L-L-I would greatly, greatly appreciate your support. I know your time is valuable and I can't wait to see you in the next episode.