How Long Should a Social Media Video Be? Best Practices for 5 Platforms
What makes for the most captivating, effective social media video? Is it the content itself; something inspiring, informative, or slap-your-knee hilarious? Or maybe it’s the quality; immaculate image clarity or high-end video production work?
The truth is that the length of a social media video has essentially more impact than content or quality when it comes to engagement and consumption.
The average global internet user spends nearly 2 hours and 30 minutes on social media every day, but that doesn’t mean they’re not picky when it comes to what video content they choose to watch and engage with. Make a video too short? It will hardly resonate with them. Too long? Who has time in the day for a lengthy social media video?
Video length is crucial when it comes to successful social media video marketing. But not all platforms are the same when it comes to the duration of your video content.
To help you better engage and inspire your target audience, here are the perfect video length guidelines for five of the premier social media platforms.
Facebook
The Big Kahuna of all social media platforms, there are more than 4 billion videos watched on Facebook every single day. That’s right, 4 billion!
But the secret to making your video content stand out from the crowd is successful editing and optimization. For shared video posts, you’ll want to keep your social media videos to around 1 minute in length, with the first five seconds being extremely crucial to draw your audience in and capture their interest.
In addition to video length, the recommended video formats for posting on Facebook are .MP4 and .MOV, and try to post square aspect-ratio videos, as they are found to be watched 35% more frequently than landscape aspect-ratio videos.
Twitter
While most Facebook users devote a little more time to the content they consume on the platform, Twitter is a little more upbeat, as most of the content across the platform tends to be text-based. However, posting videos across Twitter still proves effective, specifically with their First View tool, which generates 1.4x more video viewing length and sessions than other major social media platforms.
That being said, you’ll want to keep videos posted to your Twitter channel a tad shorter than Facebook videos, right around 45 seconds to be exact. This is also because Twitter is more restrictive than other social media platforms when it comes to posting video content, as videos posted cannot exceed 2 minutes and 20 seconds.
You can post videos in either landscape or portrait aspect ratios, and the recommended video formats are .MP4 for web uploads and .MOV for mobile uploads.
Instagram
The dominant demographics using Instagram tend to be younger generations, specifically Millennials and Gen-Zers, which generally means shortening your video length to adhere to more… fluctuating attention spans.
Because users are scrolling through Instagram faster than other social media platforms, you want to keep your video content length at least 30 seconds or shorter, while keeping in mind that Instagram Reels are intended to provide users with a more comprehensive video experience, more suitable for longer video lengths (generally 60 seconds).
With Instagram, you have three aspect ratio formats to choose from, including landscape, square and vertical, and with all the other major social media platforms, .MP4 and .MOV formats are preferred.
TikTok
Over the past few years, TikTok has rapidly risen as one of the most popular social media platforms amongst younger generations. What’s useful about TikTok as a social media marketing platform is that TikTok users are feverishly active on the app, with 90% of users accessing the app multiple times a day.
TikTok is great for businesses looking to connect with their target audience on a personal level, and is primarily utilized to post shorter video snippets that showcase your brand’s personality, tone, and message.
You’ll rarely want to post videos that are over 15 seconds in length on TikTok, with a recommended 9:16 aspect ratio in either .MP4 or .MOV format.
While the shorter length time will force you to get more creative with your content, creating an engaging follower base on TikTok is a surefire way to enhance your online presence and digital following.
LinkedIn
Businesses trying to cater to other businesses will for sure want to utilize the networking opportunities LinkedIn has to offer. While this platform isn’t necessarily known for its video content sharing, the app has made significant efforts in recent years to increase its video content and consumption for a better B2B marketing experience.
It’s generally recommended to upload videos that are either around the 30 second mark or over 10 minutes in length on LinkedIn, depending on what type of content you’re trying to share.
Brand awareness-centered content will want to hover around 30 seconds in length, while more in-depth video content such as product demos or presentation-based videos will suit longer video lengths. LinkedIn also offers an extensive variety of video formats to upload, including .ASF, .AVI, .FLV, .MOV, .MPEG-1, .MPEG-4, .MP4, .MKV, and .WebM.
Social Media Video Marketing Done Right
Choosing which social media platforms to share your video content across can be challenging, especially if you’re unfamiliar with which target demographics are utilizing which social media apps. At Atomic 8, we create custom social media video marketing strategies for businesses of all industries, producing top quality content that’s applicable and appropriate for specific social media platforms, depending on your video marketing goals. Contact us today to get started on crafting your video marketing strategy!