In another video, we talked about picking your thumbnail. However, you may not like any of the choices YouTube or Vimeo had for you, so today I wanted to talk about designing your own thumbnail.

Now, there are few pointers to keep in mind when creating and uploading your own picture.

First of all, make sure you create the right size thumbnail. When you open up your photo editing software, make sure the new document you create has a resolution of 1280×720 pixels. This is the default size of most web players, so your thumbnail won’t pull or stretch when you upload it.

When saving the thumbnail for upload, save it as a JPG or PNG and make sure you’re under the size limit for the site you’re uploading to.

As for content of the thumbnail, people respond positively to eye contact, so having a close up of a face looking directly at them makes them more likely to want to click your video.

Use bright colors. YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin and many other sites where you might share your video have white backgrounds, so including color in your thumbnail allows it to stand out.

Make sure your thumbnail reinforces your video’s title and accurately represents your content. You’re not trying to trick people into watching your video, you’re simply trying to pique their interest.

Finally, keep it simple. Thumbnails are pretty small, so if you jam it full of pictures and text, you may end up overwhelming potential viewers. Try to stick to one picture, a background and one word or short phrase.

If you don’t have the time to create a thumbnail, your company logo with the title of the video overlaid onto it is usually a safe bet since your company logo was designed to be eye catching. Plus, you can use the logo across multiple videos while only changing the overlaid text to maintain branding consistency.

Remember, thumbnails are like miniature marketing posters for your video – make them stand out and viewers will click them.
We hope this was helpful and feel free to check out some of our other videos at cn-video.com/blog. If you have any questions, give us a call at 314-843-3663 that’s 314-VIDEO ME. Thanks for watching and I’ll be CN U on video.