Editing for social media in Adobe Premiere Pro

With social media increasingly vital for everyone to grow their brand and audience, content creators, especially editors, need to have an efficient post-production workflow to stay consistent and engaged with their audience.  

Luckily for all of us reading this, Adobe Premiere Pro is an excellent platform for creating social media content because it offers a range of features and tools that can streamline the editing process. These tools are easy to use too, allowing even beginners to quickly edit and publish content to their social media channels. With that in mind, in this article, we’re going to look at how to establish a social media-focused editing workflow and highlight some of the special tools in Adobe Premiere Pro that editors can use to save time. 

Social media content requirements

Different social media platforms have different video specifications that editors must adhere to. Here is a brief breakdown of the aspect ratio formats appropriate for each major platform. Just be wary as these can change. 

Instagram

Posts require a 1:1 aspect ratio, while reels and stories are optimized for a  9:16 aspect ratio.

TikTok

TikTok has revolutionized vertical short-form videos. Most of the content on the platform is geared for a 9:16 aspect ratio. 

YouTube

YouTube supports both long-form and short-form content. The regular platform primarily features videos with a 16:9 or 1:1 aspect ratio. The Youtube Shorts subset is built for short-form, vertical videos with a 9:16 aspect ratio. 

Facebook and Twitter/X

While they might not be as popular as the other platforms on this list, these two now venerable platforms still boast a massive audience that is important to cater to. Both platforms support videos across a range of aspect ratios. 

While exporting social media content, it's important to spend additional time exporting a new video for each platform based on their video specifications. Most social media content is consumed via smartphones, so optimizing the mobile viewing experience is essential. Tailoring each release on each platform gives you an edge and allows you to reach a wider audience.

Organizing your project

Releasing content across multiple social media platforms requires a well-organized project setup. Your assets and sequences should be easy to access so you don’t waste time in organizational chaos during the later stage of the edit. 

Before editing, create multiple sequences tailored for different social media platforms. This will make it easier to export and publish your content. You can manually create a new sequence for each social media program, but this will be time-consuming. Instead, consider using Premiere Pro’s presets to match the aspect ratios and resolutions required by different platforms. 

When creating a new sequence, navigate to the Sequence Presets tab and select the Social folder. Here, you can find popular sequence presets for popular social media platforms.

If you plan on converting existing projects to a social media format, right-click the sequence in the Project Panel and select Sequence Settings. Here, you can adjust different settings based on the platform you plan to publish to. 

Premiere Pro’s built-in tools

Premiere Pro offers a variety of native tools that editors can use to streamline the post-production process. These tools are particularly valuable for inexperienced editors starting their content creation journey.

Essential Graphics

The Essential Graphics Panel is where you create all the text and motion graphics for social media content. Here, you can find customizable templates for titles, lower thirds, and other popular motion graphics. You can tweak these templates in the Essential Graphics panel to fit the overarching theme or style of the video. Best of all, these templates are super easy to use, allowing editors to publish high-quality content without extensive design skills.

Captions and graphics

Flashy captions or subtitles are de rigger for social. However, manually creating captions is both a tiring and time-consuming process. Instead, use Premiere Pro’s built-in AI tools to automatically transcribe and generate captions based on the audio track. To use this feature, navigate to the Captions and Graphics workspace. Select the clip and then click the Transcribe button to generate captions.

Always, but always, double-check the transcription for spelling or grammatical errors before exporting.

Auto Reframe

When it comes to editing for social media on Premiere Pro, Auto Reframe stands out above the rest as an essential tool. This allows you to automatically adjust the video’s aspect ratio to fit different social media platforms. Instead of manually changing the aspect ratio and generating hundreds of keyframes, you can simply click a button to streamline what can often be a daunting task. 

To use Auto Reframe, navigate to the Effects folder and search for Auto Reframe in the search bar. Simply drag and drop the effect onto the clip, and Premiere Pro will automatically begin analyzing the clip. It will find the main subject and adjust the frame to ensure they are always the video's focus. This tool is also nigh on indispensable for converting horizontal (16:9) videos into vertical (9:16) videos. 

Exporting your video

As we’ve mentioned before, different platforms have different video processing capabilities. Therefore it is absolutely vital to choose the right export settings to ensure that your video resolution is high quality and compatible with the platform you are uploading to. Luckily, Premiere Pro offers a range of export presets for popular platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. These presets will automatically adjust the resolution, frame rate, and bit rate to meet each platform’s specifications. 

When you are ready to export, head to the Export tab. Here, click the Presets dropdown menu and select the More Presets option. You will find the social media-specific presets under the Web Video category. 

Publishing your content

While choosing the export settings, you will also notice a Publish column with a list of social media companies on the left-hand side of the window. This is because Premiere Pro allows users to publish their content directly to platforms such as Behance, Facebook, TikTok, Vimeo, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube. Simply enable the platforms you wish to upload to and sign in to give Premiere Pro access. 

Premiere Pro will automatically upload the file to the chosen platforms when the export is complete. We also advise you to cue these exports on Adobe Media Encoder to export/publish multiple files simultaneously. This export workflow allows you to easily manage a high content volume while also saving delivery time.