How To Change Facebook Video Thumbnails

Facebook videos are a great way to get your message across, provide great content to your audience and grab their attention for longer than a standard update or image… and with all the latest changes to Facebook and taking into account their edgerank system, it really is all about getting as much attention as possible from your fans.

When I say Facebook video, I mean uploading your video directly to Facebook, not just copying across a YouTube link. If it’s your first upload to Facebook a new app and tab will be created automatically to display your videos.

The one’s I have highlighted above and below are custom thumbnails, they look much better than the others which are just random screenshots grabbed by Facebook. What I want to show you in this post is how to select the thumbnail of your choice to make your video stand out from the crowd.

All you need to do is click on the video that you want to change the thumbnail for and it will open up full size as below. When you scroll over the video you will see at the bottom a selection of links pop up. Roll over ‘options’ and click on ‘edit video’.

Then all you need to do is select which one of the ten thumnails you would like to use and click save! Simple. While you here, this is the place you can edit the titile, description and more of your video. You can also tag people and places in it too..

But how do I create a nice custom image like yours in my video I hear you ask!!!

Here’s how I do it…

Customising the thumnail image itself is nothing to do with Facebook I’m affraid, this is where it gets a little bit more techincal. This is done in your video editing software before you upload to Facebook.

What I do is create my image in Photoshop and then insert it into my video editing software, I make it a still frame  for around 8-10 seconds which usually works quite well. The longer you can keep the still in your video though the better. A neat trick to do this is to speak over it as it’s being displaid so you don’t lose your viewers attention.

The reason you want your still image to be in the video as long as possible is because you can’t actually control which of the thumbnails from the video become available for selection. You have to edge you bets a little, get it to show for as long as possible and it’s much more likely that Facebook will show you a thumbnail displaying the image you want to use.

If you want to do what I do and record yourself talking to your webcam and doing screen capture tutorials, the best piece of software I have found is Screenflow (for mac) and Camtasia (for PC or Mac) though in my opinion if your a mac user like me, ScreenFlow wins hands down.

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