Create a Facebook video ad

You can use video in your ad creative instead of images. Video is an increasingly effective ad type, especially for promoting brand awareness, and has large organic reach on Facebook.

Video ads allow you to optimize for link clicks, impressions, unique daily reach, landing page views, post engagement, ThruPlay, and two-second continuous video views. You can pay for link clicks or impressions.

You can also create a video views campaign without promoting an external website. See Create a video views campaign for more information.

Create a video ad

1. In Legacy Hootsuite Ads, select New campaign, enter a campaign name, select your ad account, and then select your campaign objective.
2. Select Proceed.
3. In the Image/Video section on the Ads Design page, select Videos.
4. Select Upload new video or Select from your gallery.
   

   Important: If your video is over two minutes long, deselect Instagram as a placement under Placement & Previews first to ensure the upload is successful.

5. Once your video is uploaded, select a thumbnail for the video from your gallery or a video frame, or select Upload new image to upload a custom thumbnail image.
6. Optional: Upload SRT files to include captions with your video. See Upload an SRT file for more information.
7. Optional: Select Add Video + to add one or more videos and run a split test between them to see which one converts best.
8. Proceed with the creation of your ad campaign.

Once your campaign is live, you can monitor the performance of your video ads in your campaign’s Dashboard in the Relevance and Engagement section.

Include captions with an SRT file

You can include video captions in any language by uploading a SubRip Subtitle file (SRT file). You can upload multiple files for each video.

You must save the files using the following naming convention to upload them successfully: filename.[language code]_[country code].srt. See Facebook's article on SRT file naming conventions for more information on valid language and country codes.

You must be signed into Facebook as a user who has admin permissions over the ad account to add captions to your video ads.

1. Select the file icon on the video thumbnail.
   
2. Select Upload a .srt file and select the SRT file you want to upload, then select Open.
3. Optional: Select a backup language, to set a default caption language for viewers outside of the countries for which you have uploaded caption files. For example, if you upload captions for Italian and US English, and then select US as backup language, anyone viewing your ad outside of Italy and the United States will see the English captions.