Best Practices for Videos on Facebook

Video continues to be an important part of a marketer’s playbook, as mobile video creation and consumption continues to rise. If you’re not creating and publishing video on Facebook, you’re missing out on reaching customers with your message.

While YouTube has long been the social network of choice for video content, Facebook’s renewed emphasis on video make it ripe for opportunity. According to a study by Quintly, Facebook videos have 4x higher engagement than YouTube videos, and Facebook reports that 100 million hours of video are watched every day on the social network.

Despite Facebook’s growth as a video discovery platform, brands are often only reposting the videos they’ve already created for their website or YouTube channels – instead of creating content with their Facebook fans in mind. Facebook users consume video content differently and brands need to create videos based on their habits.

Below you’ll find a short list of best practices for videos on Facebook so you can worry less about the mechanics of the video and more about what story you’re going to tell.

- 30 - 60 seconds in length is ideal – though great content can be longer if compelling enough.

- Decipherable without sound. Incorporate closed captioning or have a text overlay of key moments in the video so viewers can understand the video without a voice walking them through what they’re seeing.

- Make it for mobile. When you do use text overlays, make sure they are big enough to be seen on a mobile screen.

- Use an Impactful thumbnail to connect with audiences in the News Feed before the video starts to play. You can upload this separately from when you upload the video – it doesn’t have to be the first screen of your video.

- Avoid intros. Get right into the story. You need to catch your audience quickly to make sure they want to keep watching.

- Avoid talking heads, if possible. Most viewers don’t want to only see talking heads for the duration of a video. While it can be great to humanize a brand, the video needs to also be visually interesting.

- Upload natively. Don't even think about posting the YouTube link on Facebook. While it's fine to upload a video on both YouTube and on Facebook, you should upload the file to each platform.

- Consider making the video a Featured Video on your Page, or adding it to a specific playlist to make it easy to find.

- Promote the video using paid media on Facebook, driving additional video views.

See an example of a video with these best practices in mind on our Facebook page where our CEO Beth Monaghan talks to her daughter Izzy about being a female leader.