Video Sizes for Every Social Platform (and How to Convert Landscape to Vertical)
Video is the one thing every platform treats differently, and getting the size wrong is expensive in a way that photos never are. A mis-sized photo looks slightly off. A mis-sized video gets letterboxed into a thin strip in the middle of a phone screen, or crops the speaker's head off, or has its caption sitting directly over the thing you wanted people to read.
This is what each platform actually wants, what the safe areas cover, and what to do when the footage you have is the wrong shape. You can work through it with the free Social Media Video Resizer, which does all of this in your browser without uploading the file.
The three shapes that matter
Almost everything reduces to three aspect ratios, and once you have those you can stop memorising pixel counts.
9:16 vertical, at 1080 by 1920. This is Instagram Reels and Stories, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Reels and WhatsApp Status. The single most useful fact in this whole guide is that all five of those want exactly the same file. If a tool makes you export five times, it is wasting your time.
1:1 square, at 1080 by 1080, and 4:5 portrait, at 1080 by 1350. These are feed posts on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Portrait takes up noticeably more of a phone screen than square, which is why it usually outperforms it.
16:9 landscape, at 1920 by 1080. YouTube's main feed, LinkedIn, X, and anything that will be watched on a laptop or television.
The full list
Instagram wants 1080 by 1920 for Reels and Stories, 1080 by 1350 for a portrait feed post and 1080 by 1080 for a square one.
TikTok is 1080 by 1920, and nothing else is worth posting.
YouTube takes 1080 by 1920 for Shorts and 1920 by 1080 for everything else. A Short must be under three minutes and genuinely vertical - a letterboxed landscape clip may not be treated as a Short at all.
Facebook uses 1080 by 1920 for Reels and Stories and 1080 by 1350 for feed video.
WhatsApp Status is 1080 by 1920, and keeps files small, so this is the one where compressing before you send is worth doing.
LinkedIn takes 1920 by 1080 landscape or 1080 by 1080 square. Square performs well there because so much of the audience is scrolling on a phone.
X uses 1280 by 720 landscape.
Pinterest Idea Pins are 1080 by 1920.
Safe areas: the part nobody tells you
A platform's recommended size tells you what to upload. It does not tell you what will be visible, and on vertical video those are very different things.
Every vertical player puts its own interface on top of your footage. Down the right edge sit the like, comment, share and sound buttons. Across the bottom are the username, the caption and often a progress bar. At the top there may be a status bar or a Stories progress indicator. On a 1080 by 1920 frame, you should treat roughly the top 14% and the bottom 22% as contested, and keep about 6% clear at each side.
The practical consequence is that text belongs in the middle of the frame, not near the edges where instinct puts it. So do faces. A talking head positioned low in frame will end up behind the caption.
This is why a resizer worth using draws those regions on the preview. Guides you can see while you position the video are worth more than a number in a guide you half remember.
Turning landscape footage vertical
This is the real problem most people have: footage shot in 16:9 that now needs to be 9:16. Something has to give, and there are only four answers.
Crop to fill. Zoom in until the vertical frame is covered and let the sides go. You lose most of the width - a 16:9 frame cropped to 9:16 keeps only about a third of it - so this works when your subject is central and fails badly when it is not. What makes it usable is being able to drag the picture and choose which third survives, rather than letting a platform take the middle by default.
Blurred background. The whole landscape frame sits in the middle at full width, and the space above and below is filled with an enlarged, heavily blurred copy of the same video. Nothing is cropped, the frame is full, and it reads as deliberate. This is what most professionally made vertical posts do with landscape source material, and if you only remember one technique from this article, make it this one.
Fit with a colour. The same idea but with a flat colour instead of the blur. Better than the blur when the footage has text or detail near the edges that the blur would make look smeared, and the obvious choice for screen recordings, product shots on white and anything diagrammatic.
Stretch. Squash the picture to fit. Faces go wide, circles become ovals, and everyone can tell. The only time it is defensible is when the shapes are already close - 4:5 to 1:1, say - and even then it is a compromise.
Resolution, frame rate and file size
Upload at 1080p when you can. Every platform re-encodes what you send, so giving it a clean high-quality file means its compression has less to fight with. 720p is a reasonable compromise when you need the export to finish faster or the file to be smaller, and on a phone screen very few people will spot the difference.
Leave the frame rate alone unless you have a reason. Forcing 30fps footage to 24 makes motion judder. The one good reason to change it is a file-size problem, where dropping from 60 to 30 roughly halves the data.
On file size, do not go out of your way to shrink a video that is already reasonable. The platform will recompress it regardless, and a small file just means it starts from worse material. Compress when you have a real constraint - a slow connection, or WhatsApp - and when you do, remember that the bitrate has to cover the resolution you picked. Squeezing 1080p into a couple of megabytes will look blocky no matter what tool you use.
Five mistakes worth avoiding
Posting one landscape file everywhere. It is the single most common mistake and it is the most punished, because a letterboxed video in a vertical feed looks like an advert.
Putting your title at the bottom. That is where the caption goes. Move it up.
Exporting the same vertical video five times. Reels, Shorts, TikTok, Facebook Reels and WhatsApp Status take the same file.
Re-encoding an export. Each pass through a compressor costs quality. Go back to the original rather than resizing something you already resized.
Stretching to avoid cropping. Cropping loses information; stretching makes everything look wrong. Cropping, or a blurred background, is almost always the better trade.
Doing it without uploading anything
Most online video tools upload your file to a server, convert it there and send it back. That costs the operator real money per video, which is why free tiers are short, watermarked, or queued behind paying users. It also means a copy of your footage sits on a machine you do not control.
A browser can now do this work itself. The Social Media Video Resizer has every size above built in, does all four conversion methods with a live preview at the real output shape, draws the safe areas, and exports MP4 files one at a time or as a ZIP. Tick several platforms and it works out that the vertical ones share a single render.
The honest trade is speed: your own device does the encoding, so a one-minute clip at 1080p takes a few minutes rather than a few seconds, and the tool tells you the estimate before you commit. In exchange there is no upload, no account, no watermark and no queue. If you are resizing something you would rather not hand to a stranger's server, that is a trade worth making.
For still images rather than video, the Social Media Image Resizer covers the same ground, and the Image Editor handles cropping, watermarks and backgrounds.
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