WHY SHOULD I THINK ABOUT VIDEO SIZES?
Before we get started on social media video sizes, let’s explore the question of why is it even important to consider different types of videos when uploading them onto social media in the first place?
If you upload videos natively (directly onto a social media platform), it’s got much more chance of auto-playing. When a video auto-plays, it’s got a far better chance of being watched. If you just embed a YouTube link on Facebook, somebody has to click it. In the age of convenience (laziness), people are less likely to follow that extra step.
If it’s natively uploaded, it will auto-play, might catch somebody’s eye, and all of a sudden they’re watching your video. You can take this one step further and change the videos into different sizes; whether that’s vertical, square or regular size.
So now you’ve got a bit of surface context about why, let’s get into the juicy centre.
WHAT ARE THE SIZES OF THE VIDEOS THAT YOU NEED TO BE THINKING ABOUT FOR SOCIAL MEDIA?
When you upload videos onto Facebook on the regular timeline, the best video sizes are 16:9, which is your regular video size. 9:16 also works, which is a full portrait size. So if you’re filming vertically on a phone, that will work perfectly, but generally we don’t recommend vertical filming.
On Instagram, there’s different types of video that they support. You’ve got 9:16 and 16:9, just like Facebook, but more popular is the square 1:1 video.
YouTube
YouTube supports 16:9 and 4:3, but we highly recommend sticking to 16:9 for a more modern look and feel.
Twitter’s preferred sizes are in a 1:1 ratio up to a maximum of 1200 by 1200.
Snapchat
Snapchat, as you’d expect, is vertical. And it’s 1080:1920.
The supported aspect ratios on LinkedIn are 16:9, 1:1 and 9:16.
Social Media Campaigns
If you’re running social media campaigns, you’ll want to look into all the different options of video sizes that you can upload there.
On Facebook for instance, 16:9 is recommended when you’re doing in-stream video ads. If you’re doing Facebook messenger ads, it could also be 16:9, but also 1.91:1. Facebook carousel ads are 1:1. Facebook collection cover video sizes, however, are 1:1 or 16:9. There’s lots to remember!
So there you have it. All the different video sizes and things to think about when making social media videos.
Remember to follow those guidelines because you could end up with videos where there are sections chopped off or the video just doesn’t play properly.
And if you want any other information about video production or animation, we’ve got tonnes of blogs and videos just like this one in our knowledge centre and on our YouTube channel.
But if we haven’t touched on a topic yet that you might want the answer to, contact us today and someone at Stone’s Throw will answer them.
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