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What video sizes and formats does each social platform require?

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Quick answer

Vertical 9:16 at 1080 by 1920 pixels is the safe default for Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Stories. Feed posts favor square 1:1 or portrait 4:5. Landscape 16:9 remains the standard for regular YouTube videos. MP4 with H.264 encoding is accepted everywhere, making it the practical universal format.

Video specs look complicated until you notice the pattern: platforms have converged on three shapes, and one file format works everywhere. Build to the pattern and per-platform surprises mostly disappear.

The three shapes that cover everything

Vertical 9:16, at 1080 by 1920, is the native shape for the entire short-form layer: Instagram Reels and Stories, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. Square 1:1 and portrait 4:5 serve feed placements on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Threads, with 4:5 usually winning because it occupies more screen. Landscape 16:9, at 1920 by 1080, remains the shape for standard YouTube and works for embedded and link-preview video elsewhere. An agency that produces vertical first, then crops a 4:5 feed version when needed, covers nearly every placement from one master file.

The format answer is short

MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio is accepted by every major platform and should be the default export everywhere. Keep files comfortably under platform size caps by exporting at 1080p rather than 4K, which social compression flattens anyway, and keep runtimes inside each surface's short-form limits when the video is destined for Reels, TikTok, or Shorts.

Practical guardrails

Two habits prevent most spec problems. First, design for safe zones: keep text and faces away from the top and bottom edges of vertical video, where platform UI overlays live. Second, never let a platform auto-crop: a 16:9 video pushed to a 9:16 surface with letterboxing is the fastest visual signal of unadapted cross-posting. Cropping deliberately per shape takes minutes and reads as native everywhere.

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More in this topic

Can agencies schedule posts to Snapchat or Bluesky?

Support is limited. A few schedulers have added Bluesky, and Snapchat scheduling remains rare. Cloud Campaign does not publish to either; it publishes directly to eight networks: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, Google Business Profile, and Threads. Teams active elsewhere typically post natively and keep those posts on the calendar.

Can you add music to a scheduled Instagram post?

Partially. Cloud Campaign publishes Reels and videos with whatever audio is already in the uploaded file, so music added during editing posts normally. What scheduling tools cannot do is attach a track from Instagram's licensed music library during scheduling, because Instagram does not expose that library to third-party tools.

Can you edit a post after scheduling it?

Yes, up until it publishes. In Cloud Campaign you can revise a scheduled post's caption, media, or timing any time before it goes live. Once a post has published, edits must be made natively in the social platform, though Cloud Campaign supports deleting published posts on some networks.

Can you post the same content to every platform at once?

Yes. Most scheduling tools, Cloud Campaign included, can publish one piece of content to every connected network in a single scheduling pass. The better question is whether you should: identical cross-posting saves time but ignores format and audience differences, so strong workflows draft once and adjust per platform before scheduling.