Choosing Video Settings for Social Platforms

There are hundreds of pages listing exact upload settings for every social platform, and a large proportion of them are out of date. Specifications change, sometimes quietly, and a confident table of numbers from two years ago will send you in the wrong direction with no warning that it has.

So this guide does not contain that table. It covers the reasoning, which does not go stale, and tells you where the current numbers actually live.

Every platform publishes its own current specifications in its help or creator documentation. That is the only source worth trusting for exact figures, because it is the only one that is updated when they change.

Everything gets re-encoded anyway

This is the fact that reframes the whole question. Whatever you upload, the platform will compress it again to its own settings. You are not delivering the final file; you are delivering the source that their encoder works from.

That has a clear consequence: give their encoder a clean, generous file. Uploading something already squeezed to the minimum means their pass starts from damaged material and compounds it. Within whatever upload limits apply, more bitrate is the right instinct.

Shape matters more than pixels

The single most consequential choice is the aspect ratio, because getting it wrong means the platform crops or pads your video and you do not choose which. A landscape video in a vertical feed either gets bars or gets cut, and either way your framing is no longer yours.

• 16:9 landscape is the traditional widescreen shape, and still the norm for longer-form and desktop viewing.
• 9:16 vertical fills a phone screen and is the shape of most short-form feeds.
• 1:1 square is a compromise that reads acceptably in both contexts without being ideal in either.
• 4:5 portrait is taller than square without being fully vertical, and takes more room in a scrolling feed than square does.

Decide the shape before you shoot, not after. Cropping a landscape shot to vertical usually loses the subject, because the composition was built around space you are about to throw away.

Resolution and frame rate

1080p on the long edge is a sound default for online video: it is enough for any phone and most desktop viewing, and it does not push against upload limits. Going higher is worth it when the detail is genuinely there and the platform supports it.

For frame rate, match the source. Converting between rates introduces either judder or interpolation artefacts, and neither is an improvement. If you shot at 30, deliver at 30.

Safe areas

Feeds put interface elements over video: captions, usernames, buttons, progress bars. Anything important near an edge risks being covered. Keeping text and key subjects away from the outer margin costs nothing and avoids a video where the caption sits under a play button.

Practical checklist

1. Decide the aspect ratio before shooting and compose for it.
2. Check the platform's own current documentation for limits and recommended settings.
3. Export at a generous bitrate rather than a minimal one, within those limits.
4. Keep the frame rate the same as the source.
5. Keep important elements away from the edges.
6. Keep your original export so you can produce a different version later without a second generation of loss.