Customization of video content for different social media platforms

👇 Attention, attention! Bonus is waiting for those who will read this article till the end!

You’ve created a video with the aim to promote it thus boosting your brand, increasing conversions or educating your audience.

No matter what aim you’re pursuing when sharing your video, of course, you may wonder if you can simply upload the same piece on all your social platforms.

It takes only a few seconds for a viewer to decide to continue watching the video or move on. So making your video work right, improving viewership and shareability is the key to success. But don’t forget, each of your audiences has different expectations for content just as each social platform has its own video requirements and approaches.

So if you want your video to have success on different social media platforms, you should take into consideration all the factors below before creating a video.

In other words, it’s all about customizing your video and creating its versions for each specific platform. Yes, it can take a bit more time and work, but for sure you’ll get better results and make your video serve its prior purposes.

During years of work in the industry, Burnwe team has formed many principles related to the workstyle with clients, video production quality and delivery. So customization of video content for social platforms is one of those principles. It’s an inseparable part of our video marketing strategy and process.

We believe customization is important for different purposes, and below we’ll present them together with specific requirements for 4 major social media platforms.

Let’s go!

Facebook

Facebook says that videos containing certain attributes and inspiring certain viewing behaviours are more likely to earn distribution. But no matter how impressive your video content is, unfortunately you’ll not be able to earn that distribution and go viral if you disregard some important points needed for customization of video content to be shared on Facebook.

Most Facebook users make use of the mobile version of this social platform so in this case it’s better to customize your video to a square version. It will take much space on mobile devices and grab even more attention.

FB video always starts on mute unless users opt in to audio or select the video on mobile. And because sound and voice are really important factors to more effectively reach the viewers, you can use on-screen text plus powerful imagery to grab your audience’s attention.

If your video includes an audio voiceover or people talking, you can upload a custom captions file. Facebook transcribes audio for its ads, but it’s likely to double-check text accuracy. Custom closed captions are significant for communicating anything in depth.

Another important point for customization of video content specifically for this platform is the thumbnail. Like YouTube, you should upload a custom thumbnail for your Facebook video. The thumbnail appears before and/or after the video in different situations on mobile and web. For thumbnails you can even choose a photo that is not a part of your video, you can customize it specifically for the video with some eye-catching screen and headline.

And here are those technical requirements that are likely to be paid attention to when creating videos for Facebook.

For great results, Facebook recommends uploading videos in .MP4 and .MOV format with H.264 compression, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan, and stereo AAC audio compression at 128kbps+.

• FB Videos can be up to 240 minutes long, up to 4GB large, and have a maximum frame rate of 30fps.
• FB accepts the 16:9 (horizontal) to 9:16 (full portrait) aspect ratio.

Instagram

Instagram’s engagement is higher than on all platforms, but it's a more visual platform, so it doesn't like texts.

And again like Facebook, Instagram videos are shown in the news feed and autoplay with the sound off. Videos in the mobile feed don’t have an accompanying play button, so viewers can either watch or scroll past them. One of the important points about Instagram autoplay is that the beginning and the ending of your video should be logically tied so for example, it’s not likely to use a logo both in the beginning and in the end because your content will simply repeat.

In terms of customization of videos for Instagram, it’s essential to also talk about IG posts, IG story and reels, as well as IG TV.

IG TV is usually designed for a longer content starting from 1 minute just as in Youtube. The difference is that it’s likely to be vertical so that viewers can watch them with the whole length of the phone.

The maximum length of IG posts is up to 1 minute. It should be square to work well.

Regarding IG video stories, it’s likely to make them vertical as wide and square videos won’t be effective because of the small sizes. Especially as you can’t rotate to watch the video on a larger scale. So you’d better use that space wisely.

Though the standard length is 15 seconds, due to the new feature you can use longer videos that will be divided into small pieces on this platform. So it allows you to put several stories at the same time.

Except for the allowed video length, all the other requirements for videos are similar to Facebook’s.

The ideal Instagram video format is MP4. For ensuring high viewership and engagement from your audience, your video should include the following technical requirements.

• Minimum resolution for landscape video is 600 x 315
• Minimum resolution for square video is 600 x 600
• Minimum resolution for vertical video is 600 x 750
• Square aspect ratio is 1:1
• Max file size for all formats is 4GB
• Recommended video formats are .MP4 and .MOV
• Video length max is 60 seconds
• Frame rate range: 23-60 FPS
  
• Maximum caption: 2,200 characters.
  
• Caption recommendation: 125 characters
  

Linkedin

LinkedIn is another great platform to leverage the potential of videos.

Customization of video content for this platform is again very important if you want your video to bring the desired results.

In the case of Linkedin, wide videos work better because the majority of businessmen use this social media platform more often on the web than on mobile devices.

But to make its users happy and glad, Linkedin has recently introduced a new Stories feature for mobile. So you can put your daily video stories that, of course, should be vertical.

As there are many videos uploaded on a daily basis, to be different and unique, you can customize your video and make it square meanwhile leaving the inner video wide and having information about your content from above and below. This is for you to make your content reach audiences faster.

And as Linkedin has certain video requirements, here as well you should take them into consideration.

• Videos can be anywhere from 3 seconds to 10 minutes in length, with a maximum file size of 5GB
• LinkedIn allows you to upload both horizontal and vertical videos, but can also crop those vertical videos into a square on the newsfeed.
• LinkedIn native videos can be as large as 5GB or as small as 75MB and their duration can’t be longer than 10 minutes or shorter than 3 seconds.
  
• The platform supports a wide range of video file formats, including some of the most frequently used video file formats such as MP4, AVI or QuickTime.
  
• The aspect ratio of LinkedIn native videos can either be 1:2.4 or 2.4:1 and their resolution can vary from 256X144 pixels to 4096X2304 pixels.
  
• The frame rate of the videos for Linkedin can have between 10 and 60 frames per second while their bit rates can range from 192kps to 30MBps.
  

Twitter

It’s probably the simplest way to paste a URL and share a native YouTube video on Twitter. But native Twitter video is a good option and quite sharable on this social media platform.

Before making customization, take into consideration that Twitter much likes human presence, and putting people in the first 3 seconds; this increases emotional intensity viewers have with the content.

Again square videos work best for Tweets and newly launched Fleets (Twitter stories) should be vertical. Twitter native videos again autoplay without sound unless viewers click on them. So you can use texts and subtitles.

• Possible video size for Twitter reaches 512 MB only. If your recording is bigger, you can compress it.
• Resolution should be no lower than 32 x 32 pixels, its max is 1920 x 1200 pixels.
  
• Video duration shouldn’t exceed 140 seconds.
  
• If you provided your credit card to set up a Twitter Ad account, you can upload video up to 10 minutes long.
  
• Twitter accepts only two extensions: MP4 and MOV.
  
• There are two possible video styles: Portrait and Landscape. Their recommended aspect ratios are between 1:2.39 and 2.39:1.
  

Bonus

If you want to be more eye-catching on social platforms, you can create pattern interrupt videos for each platform based on its interface simulation just as we created for our partner.

This way you provide more attractive content as people are much used to the same UI in socials, but you offer them something unique and different.

To sum up

Identifying which social media platforms work best for your marketing needs and understanding how to use your content right will enable you to shape quite a firm basis for your future success.

Customization of video content for different social media platforms should be a part of your marketing strategy. This will serve to improve not only your online visibility, but also to boost brand recognition and customer loyalty through the right representation of your content message.

In general, just remember that you should have both wide, square and vertical versions of the same video because all of them will be definitely used on different social media platforms.

Customization of video content; are you ready to rock with your videos on different social platforms?