What happened
Substack announced that users can now post videos directly to Notes in the Substack app and on the web, and Notes can be embedded on external webpages. The change gives Substack Notes near-parity with what X used to offer creators — short-form posts, native video, and portable embeds — while carrying the Substack subscriber graph underneath. The context: Beehiiv shipped a Slack-like community layer and podcast tooling earlier this year, and Substack has been quietly rebuilding the surrounding social layer around Notes to keep creators from bleeding attention out to LinkedIn or Threads. Native video on Notes plus embed portability closes the last gap. For B2B founders who publish a newsletter and want a short-form outlet that does not require rebuilding a follower graph from scratch, Substack now works the way LinkedIn worked in 2022: short thoughts, video where useful, comments from an actual subscriber base.
Why Substack video Notes matter now
MagnetizeX builds founder visibility systems for B2B firms.
B2B distribution has been over-indexed on LinkedIn since the 2024 video push, and LinkedIn's March Authenticity Update has thinned the reach top for accounts that lean on volume. Substack Notes offers a smaller but more engaged surface: the audience is opted-in subscribers, not algorithmic viewers. External embeds mean a video Note can live on your company blog, in a Notion doc, or in a comparison page, which is a distribution multiplier that LinkedIn native video cannot match — LinkedIn videos do not embed cleanly outside the platform. For founders with a newsletter list of 2,000 to 20,000, Notes video is now the fastest-growing distribution channel per unit of effort.
- Ship one video Note per week.
Record a 60 to 90 second video Note answering one specific customer question, post it Tuesday morning, then embed it in the following week's newsletter and on your company blog. That single asset now travels across four surfaces — Substack Notes, newsletter, blog, and any external embed — from one recording session.
- Cross-embed into comparison pages.
Substack embeds work in any page that accepts HTML. Add a founder-explains video Note to your top three comparison pages ("[You] vs [competitor]") to inject social proof and dwell time onto pages that AI answer engines already retrieve heavily. Comparison pages with video embed convert at higher rates than static text-only pages.
- Rebuild your Substack Notes cadence.
Treat Notes like a Twitter/X replacement: three to five short takes per week, at least one video, with each Note tagged to a specific newsletter issue. That cadence keeps subscribers engaged in the gap between issues without additional writing load. Beehiiv does not yet offer the same native Notes analog, which makes Substack the temporary front-runner for founders in this pattern.
By the numbers: Substack Notes video plus external embed matches functionality X previously charged for, and Substack has no per-post reach cap — subscribers see every Note unless the algorithm hides it, which it currently does not do at Substack's scale.
What to do this week
Record one 60-second video answering the question your last three sales calls opened with. Post it as a Substack Note today, embed it into your next newsletter issue, and paste the embed onto your top comparison page. Track link clicks in Fathom or Plausible over the next 14 days — the multi-surface embed will outperform any LinkedIn-only post of the same content by a meaningful margin.