Our guide to nailing Facebook video covers

Everything you need to know about Facebook’s highly-anticipated feature for Pages.

What are Facebook video covers?

Since 2012, Facebook has provided pages and profiles with the ability to display content in the prime real estate position, at the top of the Page. Cover photos have become quite an art form, but Facebook’s latest announcement of video covers has kicked things up a gear.

First noted by Social Media Today at the end of April, several accounts have already seen the feature roll out. “By making cover video available, we want to help you create more engaging interactions and drive more rich experience for your audience by letting you spotlight your creative content in one of the most prominent spaces: your Page cover,” Facebook told SMT in a statement.

So here’s all of the key information to get you prepared for when your Facebook page changes over to video cover images.

What do I need to know?

If the feature is active, you’ll see a video camera icon in the top left of your Facebook cover. The key criteria for the video file is that it should be:

• Between 20 and 90 seconds
• At least 820 x 312 pixels in size

The video can appear with or without sound, and loops in a similar way to a gif.

Once live, the automatically generated “[insert page name] just updated their cover photo” post will NOT appear on your page Timeline. Instead, the clip gets added to the video collection on your Facebook page – making for a much cleaner experience for everyone!

How will the video cover appear on mobile?

Well, that all depends on the individual user. In an office-wide test for our client’s Facebook page, we had three seperate variations of the mobile experience – one black box with no video, one video cover that autoplayed and one video cover that you had to press play to see.

Hopefully this will be addressed as the feature rolls out to more pages (and more users update their Facebook app).

Where can I see some cool examples?

The feature is slowly rolling out, so this list is only a short one at the moment! But there’ll be more creative examples as time goes on.

Here’s some examples that we’ve found so far:

• Jaden Digital clients Radio Today, and Kawai Australia.
• Disneyland had one, but have since reverted back to a static image
• Netflix shows Narcos and Orange is the New Black