Social Media Video Specs Cheat Sheet

As companies continue to embrace the need for videos in their social content strategy, and the

social networks themselves continue to build out the functionality to support an increasingly

visual social world, it’s important to stay up-to-date with best video practices. Knowing exactly

what networks want in a video will help ensure you’re optimizing your content as best as you

can.

In an eort to help all of you social media managers, we’ve centralized the video specs for the

top social media networks.

YouTube and Google+ Video Specs

With over a billion users watching hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube every single day,

you can image that the video site has some robust speciﬁcations for videos you upload. You can

ﬁnd the entire list on their support page, but here are some of the most important to bear in

mind when creating a video.

We’ve rolled up the Google+ and YouTube formats, since Google+ automatically converts up-

loads to YouTube for sharing.

Format MP4 with moov atom at the front of the ﬁle and no edit lists.

YouTube Resolution and Aspect Ratio Recommendations YouTube uses a 16:9 aspect ratio,

and videos not meeting that standard will be shown with pillar or letter boxes, which are the

black bars at the left/right and top/bottom of the screen. To ensure the best visual experience,

encode with the following resolutions:

Social Media Video Specs Cheat Sheet

YouTube Recommended Video and Audio Bitrates for Uploads

Below are the recommended audio and video bitrates for uploads. YouTube does make a point

to say content should be encoded and uploaded in the same frame rate that it was recorded at.

2160p

1440p

1080p

720p

480p

360p

240p

3840 x 2160

2560 x 1440

1920 x 1080

1280 x 720

854 x 480

640 x 360

426 x 240

2160p (4k)

1440 (2k)

1080p

720p

480p

360p

35 - 45 Mbps

16 Mbps

8 Mbps

5 Mbps

2.5 Mbps

1 Mbps

53 - 68 Mbps

24 Mbps

12 Mbps

7.5 Mbps

4 Mbps

1.5 Mbps

Type

Video bitrate, standard

frame rate

Video bitrate, high

frame rate

Mono

Stereo

5.1

128 kbps

384 kbps

512 kbps

Type Audio bitrate

Social Media Video Specs Cheat Sheet

Pinterest and LinkedIn Video Specs

Pinterest, LinkedIn and SlideShare all rely on YouTube for video hosting for their networks, so

consult the above numbers.

Facebook Video Specs

Facebook has become an amazing network for sharing your video content on. By building out

functionality like autoplay in the Newsfeed, the ability to add call-to-actions and robust Video

Insights have made it a must for social video syndication. These speciﬁcations come from the

Facebook Ads guide and details how to optimize videos for the network.

Video H.262 video compression, high proﬁle preferred, square pixels, ﬁxed frame rate and

progressive scan.

Frames Max of 30fps.

Format .mp4 container ideally with leading mov atom and no edit lists.

Aspect Ratio 1.33:1 / 4:3 / SDTV, 1.3751:1 / ﬁlm, 1.77 / 16.9 / HDTV. 1.85:1 / Film, 2:39:1 or

2:40:1 / Widescreen, no pillar boxing or letter boxing.

Audio Stereo AAC audio compression, 128kbps + preferred.

File Size 1.75GB max.

Bitrate No limit to bitrate ﬁle if you’re using two pass encoding, as long as your ﬁle doesn’t

exceed 1 GB. Otherwise, 8 megabits per second fro 1080p and 4 megabits per second for 720p.

Length 45 minutes max

Social Media Video Specs Cheat Sheet

Instagram Video Specs

Instagram is a Facebook company, so it’s safe to say you can expect the network to embrace

video marketing as well as Facebook. These speciﬁcations come from the Facebook Ads guide

page for Instagram.

Aspect Ratio 1.9:1 to 1:1

Video H.264 video compression, high proﬁle preferred, square pixels, ﬁxed frame rate, pro-

gressive scan

Format .mp4 container ideally with leading mov atom and no edit lists.

Audio Stereo AAC audio compression, 128kbps + preferred

File Size 30MB max

Frames 30fps max

Bitrate No limit to bitrate ﬁle if you’re using two pass encoding, as long as your ﬁle doesn’t

exceed 1 GB. Otherwise, 8 megabits per second for 1080p and 4 megabits per second for 720p.

Twitter Video Specs

Incorporating videos into your Twitter strategy can help you reach beyond the platform’s 140

character limit. Just make sure to follow Twitter’s set guidelines when creating a video for the

site.

File Size 15MB max

Duration Between .5 and 30 seconds

Dimensions Between 32x32 and 1280x1024

Social Media Video Specs Cheat Sheet

Aspect ratio Between 1:3 and 3:1

Frame Rate 40FPS or less

Audio Mono or Stereo

Tumblr Video Specs

Tumblr is a social media network that thrives on visual content, so it can play a key part when

distributing your videos. While the site is somewhat ambiguous on their speciﬁcations, keep

the following specs in mind when creating your video.

Video specs File type: MOV, MP4, or embed code from: YouTube, Vimeo, Vine Max size: 5 min

per day, 100 MB per ﬁle Dimensions: 500 x 750px max

Audio specs File type: MP3 or embed Max size: 10 MB

Landscape

Portrait

1280

640

320

640

480

240

2048K

768K

256K

1024K

768K

256K

128K

64K

96K

64K

720

360

180

640

480

240

Orientation Width Video bitrate Audio bitrateHeight

Social Media Video Specs Cheat Sheet