From the course: Social Media Video Strategy: Weekly Bites

Creating effective video thumbnails - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Social Media Video Strategy: Weekly Bites

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Creating effective video thumbnails

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- Video thumbnails are the book cover of your video. Their job is to hook interest, inform your audience what the video is about, and give a sense of the style and tone of the video. And unlike book covers tucked in a shelf, thumbnails are displayed out in front for everyone to see, alongside hundreds of others, so they've got to stand out from the rest. That's a lot for a thumbnail sized image to do. This probably means the automatically generated thumbnail your video hosting site chooses by default is not going to be the best image to hook and inform your audience. In fact, 90% of the most successful YouTube videos have a custom thumbnail, which can increase audience engagement by more than 150%. So create you own, and follow a few best practices to make sure you're making the best video book cover you can. The most important task is choosing the best representative image. Identify attention-grabbing images that will speak to your target audience, give a good idea of what the video is about in terms of content and tone, and appropriately accompany your video headline. If you choose a frame from your video itself, make sure the image is clear, not complex, and choose a close-up shot, rather than a wide shot. Thumbnails live on all types of devices, so wide shots, or images with too much going on, will not resonate, especially on smaller mobile screens. Many times however, using a frame from your video isn't the most effective image in terms of impacting clarity. It's often better to take a separate photo with more focus and deliberation. You can stage a photo shoot, or you can just take some photos with your phone during the video shoot itself. Photos with faces are usually the most popular, especially on YouTube, because people are emotionally drawn to other people. Once you do that, I recommend color correcting it a bit, so that the image really pops. There's research that shows that thumbnails are most effective when they're higher contrast and a bit oversaturated and over sharpened. You'll also often want to add text to your thumbnail. Again, because people are looking at it on many different sizes of screens, be sure to make the text clear and bold. The colors should contrast with the main image so that it's easily readable and you shouldn't have too many words. Make them meaningful, powerful keywords that will grab attention. You also need to get the size right. Each platform has different size requirements and if you don't hit those, your thumbnail may end up looking stretched or squeezed or improperly cropped. Many sites will give you a range of size possibilities, so try to choose the largest possible size within that range, so your image will look its best. For example, YouTube's current recommended thumbnail size is 1280 pixels by 720 pixels. It lists a minimum width of 640 pixels, but don't go for the minimum; go for the maximum if you can, and make sure that it's at the correct shape or aspect ratio, which will always be the same aspect ratio of your video frame. For YouTube, that's a 16 by nine aspect ratio. If you have some graphic design skills, great. There's a lot you can do in Photoshop or other graphics programs. If you need a bit more help, there's a free online tool on Canva that can help you create great thumbnails. It lets you easily set the right size, perform your color correction, add shapes and other elements, add text, add backgrounds, work with logos and graphics, and a lot more. It also lets you dynamically resize it for other platforms, if you need to create thumbnails for additional online spaces. Once you create your perfect thumbnail, show it to a few friends. Ask them if they'd click on it and you can always change your thumbnail down the road if you want to try a different approach. Sometimes, refreshing a thumbnail can give a video a whole new life.

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