Facebook Profile Videos and Cover Videos

In recent years Facebook has been expanding its uses for video.  The last big addition was Facebook Live which as its name suggests allows Facebook users to stream live videos on its platform.  These are recorded by Facebook and the recording can remain on your Facebook Page if you wish. I wrote about this previously. Here is Part 1 of a two-part series.

Profile Videos

Since 2015 we have been able to use looping videos for Profile Photos. The only way to create and post these is on iOS and Android mobile devices. The video appears on mobile devices and desktop as well.  I tried this.  The video can be up to 7 seconds long. You can make the profile photo temporary and Facebook gives you various options for length of time beginning with 1 hour.  If you would like to give it a try, here are the directions.  If you are like me, you may want to delete your trial videos, here is how to do that.

Cover Videos

Recently, Facebook started testing video cover photos on Facebook Pages.  One of the parish Pages that I manage now has that option. You can tell if you have it, by clicking on the camera icon on the Cover photo. If Upload Photo/Video is an option, you have it too.

I was eager to try this option, so I uploaded a video that I had created for a Facebook ad.  The video filled the space, but the height of the video was too great and text on the top and bottom of some segments did not show.  I experimented with different sizes, but then the video in which all the text was visible was not wide enough to fill the space, so there are black margins on both sides.  This is not bad, but not what I wanted.

Here is what it looked like:

 

My next attempt was to create a video with the text in the center.  This time when I uploaded the video, it filled the space and all of the text was within the frame. Here is what it looked like:

I noted that using a video, there was no option to add a description as there is with a photo and Facebook did not create a post saying that we updated the cover photo.  Maybe these functions will be added after the testing is completed.

I could not find any information on Facebook or through Google search on specs for these videos.  However, Matt Navarra reported via Twitter that the length can be 20 to 90 seconds and the size can be no smaller than 820 x 312 pixels.

Here is the Official Confirmation from Facebook about this testing:

What do you think of this new option?  Do you think you will use it?