Social media and video marketing exist in beautiful harmony together. Both are extremely good for your business, and when they come together, they can bring thousands of followers or loyal customers to your website.
But making video content for social media can be tricky. Your journey doesn’t end on recording and editing a clip: after that, you need to convert your video into one of the formats supported by a website you chose to upload a video on. It is not so hard to do, but it is so easy to get lost in the ocean of requirements, formats, and converters.
That is the reason why we prepared this guide! Today we will explain to you all about converting videos for social media, and in the end, we have a bonus for you, so stay tuned!
Top 4 of most popular video formats
Your best free video converter is the one that can convert videos to the biggest number of popular video formats. But what are these formats? Let’s talk!
MOV
We will start with one of the most popular, a MOV format. The MOV files are convenient for people who love watching their videos on the big screen since they encode high-quality videos.
MOV is easy to edit, and it is a format for Apple QuickTime, but it does not work on almost all popular social media platforms. That’s why you need to skip conversion to this format.
MPG/MPEG
You can use any video converter to convert your video into MPEG/MPG format, but modern websites rarely support this format. It fits more for movies or long clips.
WMV
This format was created by Microsoft, and it can be used on some social media. However, it is much better to use it in emails since you can save WMV videos to be extremely high-quality but small at the same time. It is a good format, but it is not ideal for social media.
MP4
Now we’re talking! The ideal social media format that you can probably get in every online video converter, even in the free ones.
Videos saved in MP4 format remain high-quality but relatively small to ease downloading social media pages for users.
Best formats for every social media
Making clips for social media platforms is an essential part of social media marketing. And what’s fun here is that every website has its own requirements for videos. The four main social media platforms ask for completely different things. The only thing they have in common is that they ask for AAC audio compression format.
The platform supports MP4 and MOV videos with a maximum resolution of 1280×720, a maximum size of 4GB per file, and a maximum length of 120 minutes. But we doubt that anyone will be able to sit through a two-hour Facebook video.
Requirements for Twitter videos are much stricter than on Facebook: you can upload only 2 minutes 20 seconds of video content with a maximum size of 512MB, with resolution up to 1280×1024 and only in one format MP4.
Instagram has its own atmosphere, and you can upload a video there for only up to sixty seconds. As for size, it should be no more than 4GB per video, and the resolution is up to 1080p. As for formats, Instagram prefers MP4.
YouTube
Youtube gives you more freedom than other platforms, and you can upload videos there in all four popular formats we have mentioned above + AVU, 3GPP, FLV, and WebM.
You can upload up to twelve hours of content in one clip, and they can have up to 8K resolution.
A tip on how to convert videos from special formats
It’s not so hard to find a video converter that will be able to perform a MOV-to-MP4 conversion. But if we talk about more unique formats, it is a hundred times harder to find an AVCHD-to-MP4 converter, for example.
Since your camera can have an absolutely crazy source format, you need something better than a free video converter to do this. We suggest you use conversion toolkits or professional converters like Aiseesoft Video Converter Ultimate or NCH Prism to perform this task.
Bonus: top 5 ideas for awesome social media videos
Our promised bonus: the best ideas for videos to add to your social media strategy. Are you ready?
Behind the scenes
Our favorite video idea. As an owner of the company, you can show how your product is made, how your team works every day, etc.
Also, you can show behind the scenes of creating the video itself: we are sure it will be very interesting content to see for your customers.
Interviews
Here you have effortless video editing and a fascinating topic.
You don’t necessarily need to get a celebrity for an interview. Just find someone you are sure your customers would love to know better or learn something from them.
Animated clips
This type of content can be expensive, but animated videos and, especially, animated advertisements are very hot right now.
We suggest you go to Fiverr or Upwork and look for young talents who will do the task perfectly and relatively cheaply. You will give them a lot of exposure and will get an awesome clip for a really reasonable price. A win-win situation!
Content teasers
These videos should be short, somewhat mysterious, and give an aftertaste of a secret after watching.
We recommend you upload teasers only a day or two before uploading the actual content because if you make people wait for too long, they will forget about the video’s existence.
Takeovers
Let one of your employees take over the video, and make it “their way.” The audience loves this format, and you can get something very creative and exciting in the end.
Also, takeovers are a perfect opportunity to show the faces behind your products and make your company closer to consumers.
Conclusion
Now you know how to prepare your video to be uploaded on social media, and we are sure that your next social media upload will be a huge hit.
We hope you enjoyed our guide, and let’s start converting!
