One of the biggest benefits of video creation is its long term value to your business. A single video can reside on your website, blog, or on your YouTube channel or Facebook Video Library for years (and really, forever). Even if you are simply sharing your videos on your social media channels, their life is a lot different than a typical social media post because uploaded videos reside in their own library (of sorts) in addition to your post history. And it’s because videos can live on forever that we want to optimize them to be found for weeks, months and years after they have been published. People are searching Google, on YouTube and even within Facebook for video content, and without optimizing your videos, you have very little chance of having your videos being discovered after publishing.

This post will focus on Facebook Business Page videos specifically. In order to optimize a Facebook video on your Business Page or Profile, the video needs to either be uploaded to your Page or Profile *or* be a Facebook Live video broadcast from your Page or Profile.

4 Ways to Optimize your Facebook Videos

Let’s first explain how to get to the video edit screen, which is where you need to start for these 4 Facebook video optimization techniques. From the Posts section of your Facebook Page, click on the 3 dots in the upper right hand corner of the video post you want to optimize and choose “Edit Post” from the drop down menu. Now, the Edit screen will pop up and you can optimize your Facebook video according to the 4 tactics below.

Note: Depending on the view, your drop-down option might read, “Edit Video” instead of “Edit Post”.

• Choose a Thumbnail Facebook gives you the choice of 10 thumbnails for your video. A video thumbnail is important because it’s what’s shown to people before your video starts to play (and while it sits in your Facebook Video Library, waiting to be viewed). If you don’t like any of the 10, you can click to upload a custom thumbnail for your video. Bonus Tip: If you record Facebook Live videos, take a selfie before going Live so you have that to upload as your custom thumbnail should you not like any of the thumbnail choices provided.
• Give your Video a Title (or Edit it to be more Search-Friendly) Depending on when you recorded or uploaded the video you are optimizing, you might be adding a title for the first time or simply have the option to edit the title you initially gave your video when you recorded or uploaded it. Your video title will show up in bold on top of the video description. It will also be used in your Facebook Video Library. Make sure to keep strategic keywords and good search practices in mind when you title your video because it will improve your chances of the video showing up in Facebook platform search.
• Add Video Tags Tags help your video to surface in Facebook search results. When you start typing in the Tags field, you’ll see what tags are suggested, thanks to the autofill feature. Tags include topics as well as locations. You also have the option to add your own video tags if the preset tag options aren’t good fits for your video topic.
• Add (& Edit) Captions Along the menu in the Edit Video view, click on the Captions tab to generate captions for your video, upload an SRT file or edit existing captions. Over 80% of Facebook users watch videos without the sound on, so captions are key. To learn more about Facebook video captions, read this post.

Taking these additional video optimization steps does take a little bit more time, but will ensure your Facebook videos go a lot further towards helping you achieve your marketing goals.

Updates in March 2019

Facebook has added a couple more features to their video editing screen. From this view, you can select the Facebook video playlist you’d like to add this video to.

Then in the thumbnail section, you have the option not just to select from the auto-generated thumbnails and upload your own custom image, but also to move through your entire video and select a specific frame from your video to use as your video thumbnail image.

Enter: Facebook Premiere

Once Facebook introduced Facebook Premiere, which lets you schedule pre-recorded videos for future publishing and invites your current Facebook Likes to get a reminder of your upcoming video premiere, even more features were made available for Facebook video optimization options.

When uploading your video, you can set its publish date and time, and control whether or not its published to the News Feed, displayed in Watch, and if embedding of your video is allowed.