Facebook is clearly one of the most important marketing platforms available to businesses today, with well over a BILLION daily active users. According to stats from Tubular Insights, 500 MILLION people watch Facebook video every day. And that number is all set to go up dramatically...

Engagement

The idea is to focus even more on video content, increasing engagement on pages (thereby making Facebook even more sticky), and delivering a richer experience.

Facebook's Official Statement

'By making cover video available, we want to help you create more engaging interactions and drive more rich experience for your audience by letting you spotlight your creative content in one of the most prominent spaces: your Page cover.'

Recommended Size

Cover videos are likely to be seen at different sizes across different devices. As of June 2017, Facebook recommends a video of dimensions 820x462 which will be cropped to 820x312 in desktop browsers – so take care not to have important content at the top or bottom edges.

The running length must be between 20 and 90 seconds, and it will loop automatically. How long your cover video should be depends largely on the content and purpose of the page – remember that engagement and viewing time drops dramatically the longer a video is.

As with other Facebook video, Page Cover Image Video will start playing automatically without sound, which can be turned on manually.

The same care must be taken with sound on a Facebook Cover Image Video as with sound on a website homepage video – remember who’s likely to be looking at it, where they’ll be when they do, what they’ll be doing at the time.

Can my page use video?

Go to change the cover image of your page as you normally would - on desktop computers that means hovering the mouse over the top left of your cover image to get the [Change Cover] option. Normally this will show the simple camera icon for photo - but when your page can accept a video, it will alternate between this camera icon and a video icon. Don't worry, it'll be fairly obvious.

You can choose a video which already exists in your posts or library, or upload a new one. Keep in mind the size and cropping previously mentioned.

You can see two different examples of Facebook Page Cover Video here: