How to Create Animated Facebook Cover? How to Make Animated Facebook Cover?

General information

Facebook is an immensely popular social media platform that is used by millions of people on a daily basis. Both regular people and brands can create their accounts and express themselves on the platform, but there’s also another purpose for this all, and that is advertising. 

Online advertising as a whole has long proven itself to be extremely effective, and Facebook has gone through several iterations to get to the current look of their interface that allows for several different placements for your ads. However, the first thing you’ll see each time you go on someone else’s Facebook page, no matter if it’s a person or a company, is your profile’s banner.

Facebook standards for cover videos

That being said, while static images are effective on their own, nothing attracts more attention than a short cover video that plays right after you’re landing on the user’s page. Each and every participant of Facebook as a platform is capable of adding a cover video, but there are some standards that you’re supposed to follow.

First of all, there are video’s dimensions – the bare minimum is 1250 x 312 pixels, but it is recommended to get 1250 x 463 pixels for better aspect ratio (2.7). The next requirement is the overall length, which is between twenty and ninety seconds. After that, there are your regular warnings about video being misleading or deceptive, and so on.

This basically sums up the requirements for your animated Facebook cover video. They’re not that strict, and the amount of possibilities and use cases for an animated cover is more than enough to counteract all of the disadvantages.

Even a 60 second cover video would be able to serve as an introduction to your brand or service. Practice shows that people prefer animated advertisements over static ones when it comes to Facebook covers, too.

Additionally, animated cover videos could be used to impress your visitors right off the bat, giving them the reason to stay for a bit more if they’re interested. At the same time, such a video can be far more descriptive and informational than any of the still banners, making it an obvious choice.

That being said, while the effectiveness of an animated Facebook cover seems obvious enough, one question still remains, and that is “How to make an animated Facebook cover in the first place?”. Admittedly, this process is a bit more complicated than just posting a complete video, but there are many different tools and appliances that could be used to simplify this process without involving complex video editing software that needs a wealth of knowledge to work with.

Online editing tool is one way to name these tools and appliances. These kinds of services are offering a specific level of video editing with a simplified interface so that every user could use it, and there’s a huge market of such tools right now. Next, we’ll be looking at some examples of the tools that might serve as an answer to our question: “How to create animated Facebook covers?”

In this specific article we’ll be going over five examples: Creatopy, Clipchamp, Wave.video, Biteable and Viewst. It is worth noting that due to the nature of the process, the biggest difference between those services is going to be the interface and the amount of functions available, and the process itself is relatively similar from start to finish.

How to create animated Facebook cover?

Despite the fact that there are many different online ad builders that are capable of creating a Facebook cover ad, it’s not difficult to figure out some basic steps that are common for all of the participating services. These steps are going to be listed down below:

1. Our first step is always going to be about logging in to your account within a specific service, or creating a new one, since your accounts are used as storage places for your projects, be it videos, gifs or regular static banners.

2. Typically, both actions should take you to your first page inside of a builder, which serves as an overview of everything you’ve made so far. After that, you’ll have another choice presented before you: to start with a blank slate of a video or to use one of the templates as a basis. Both options imply that you’ve chosen the specific video cover template that is made to work best with Facebook.

It should be noted that all of the online tools have their own libraries of templates, meaning that your choice of pre-made templates would not be the same from one service to another.

3. Next you’ll get either a blank screen that is already fit to work best as a Facebook video cover, or a template of your choosing. This step is one of the two that would vary greatly depending on the purpose of your Facebook video ad. All of the services included allow for both images and videos to be uploaded or taken from the built-in libraries to be used in the process of creating an animated cover. A timeline feature is also available to be used to help you with arranging the order of your clips and images the way you want them to be.

4. After figuring out the correct order of all of the different parts of your Facebook cover ad, you can also customize the entire timeline using many instruments at your disposal, including color changing, resizing, animation effects, objects, text boxes, transitions, and many more. That way, your future video cover would look unique and one-of-a-kind.

Just as with the template library, it should be noted that each of the services has their own set of objects, images and videos available as the means of customization, and the similarities are supposed to be few and far between.

5. As soon as the creative part of the process is complete, you’re free to preview and/or download your end result in the form of a video. Different services offer different sets of formats for the conversion, but some of the major ones, such as GIF or MP4 are available on every platform. 

This concludes the entire process of answering your question about “How to make animated Facebook cover?”. After you’ve got the video downloaded into your system, you’re free to upload it to Facebook and set it as your animated cover ad.

While the guide itself might seem somewhat vague, it is true that the process of editing a video in general consists of a general carcass of a process and the creative process – and the latter differs heavily depending on your goals, the purpose of this Facebook cover, and many more parameters. 

Now we’ll go over all of the different online ad builders mentioned earlier, as well as their specifics and unique traits.

Online advertisement builders

Creatopy is our first example of a multifunctional platform that positions itself as a comprehensive visual production platform with many different features. This includes different file formats to work with, a plethora of templates for different ad sizes or social media platforms, and many more than that – offering an interesting experience with an efficient interface.

Creatopy landing page

Clipchamp is a somewhat different service that focuses on video editing. This specific approach allows it to offer a slightly different set of features, such as video editing, compressing and converting, as well as webcam recording. Its template library is also impressive, as well as the stock library that has both audio and video elements for you to work with – and all of that is within your browser.

Clipchamp landing page

Wave.video is another competitor on the video editing market, although this one is also unique in its own way. The biggest difference is that it allows users to not just edit their videos, but also host and embed them with ease. This, combined with a video player that can be customized at will, allows Wave.video to work on a somewhat different level than most of its competitors. Of course, the usual video editing set of features is also there, as well as their own stock library of templates and objects.

Wave.video landing page

Biteable offers a slightly different approach to the video editing, claiming that it’s suitable for all of the different parties that might be interested in video editing for a specific purposes, including agencies, entrepreneurs, HR and marketers, among others. Biteable is suitable for many different video editing tasks, from video pitches and self-promotion to video ads and communicational videos for your audience – Biteable has it all.

Biteable landing page

Viewst has one thing that is its prime focus, and it’s ads production. No matter the type or the purpose of the ad – be it a video, a GIF or a static image in any format possible – Viewst has it all, with a user-friendly interface, a huge variety of editing features and an extensive library of templates and objects that can be utilized in your search for a perfect advertisement. This focus on working with all kinds of advertisements allows Viewst to be a perfect solution for many different groups of people with different goals and purposes.

Viewst landing page

Conclusion

Animated Facebook covers are several times more eye-catching than anything static, and this is why animated advertisements are so popular right now. There are many different tools that allow regular users to edit their videos in many ways, and most of those tools are designed with an inexperienced user in mind, thus making them as easy to understand as possible. 

Today we went over some basic information about animated Facebook covers, and attempted to answer the question that is “How to make an animated Facebook cover?”. Additionally, we’ve listed the common steps of any online video editor, and examined some of the participants of the online video editing market.