Best Video Specs for Facebook

Time：2020-09-09 14:07:13
Class：Weblog
Read：24

Video content tends to do so much better on Facebook than photos or written content. It is a more convenient content format for most people to consume and then there’s also Facebook’s algorithm which favors videos over other types of content.

So that’s already a good reason for everybody to put out more video content on Facebook. But how do you do that in a way that looks good on people’s devices and gets more reach? The one thing you need to keep in mind is that you want to design your videos for mobile.

Read on and let’s find out how you can do that.

Codec

Let me start with the codec because I see many people not talking about this at all.

Every type of media we share on the Internet is compressed and decompressed using a codec. And each platform (YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) has a preferred codec.

For Facebook, it’s H.264, which is a pretty popular codec used for video. So, make sure to render your content using the H.264 codec after you’re done with the video editing.

Aspect ratios

The next, equally important thing is the aspect ratio of your video. And for Facebook, there’s no shortage of options to pick from.

Facebook will let you upload videos in any aspect ratio ranging from the 16:9 full landscape to 9:16 full portrait, vertical videos. And in between these two aspect ratios, right now there are another 3 different aspect rations you can pick from. Facebook tends to change the video specs so that they optimize it better for mobile especially so in the future we might see even more aspect ratios.

Anyways right now you can use any of the following:

16:9 full landscape
1:1 square
4:5 vertical
2:3 vertical
9:16 full portrait

What format should you choose?

Alright, so you have plenty of aspect ratios to pick from, but which one is the best?

Now from my personal experience after providing video editing services though my company – Veedyou.com – I noticed the 4:5 format tends to perform better for most content creators. The 9:16 does really well too.

So, I would probably go with one of those two if I were you.

Facebook actually recommends using the 1:1 or any of the vertical ones, but not the horizontal 16:9 because it will not look great on mobile devices (unless you flip your phone, but apparently people don’t really do that on Facebook as much as they do on YouTube for example).

So, there you have it – 4:5, 1:1 or 9:16 should be your top 3 choices.

Now, to make things a little more complicated, you probably know that there are different types of video ads you can run on Facebook.

There are Facebook feed videos, instant article videos, in-stream videos, market place videos, Facebook stories videos and video feeds. I think I’m not missing anything.

And each of these has its own recommended video specs, as follows:

Facebook feed videos

Resolution: at least 1,280 by 720 pixels

Aspect ratio: 9:16 to 16:9

Max file size: 4GB

Max duration: 240 minutes