Facebook Story size

Your picture fills the screen, and Facebook draws its own controls over it. The progress bar, your profile picture and your name run along the top edge. At the bottom sits the bar viewers use to send a reply. Anything you place under those controls is partly hidden.

Meta’s ads guide for Stories video ads turns this into margins: keep text and logos out of roughly the top 14% (250 pixels) and the bottom 20% (340 pixels). That leaves a clear band about 1,330 pixels tall through the middle of a 1080 × 1920 frame.

If the same vertical file will also run as a Facebook Reel, use the deeper margins Hootsuite gives for Reels ads: 14% at the top, 35% at the bottom and 6% at each side. A layout that clears those also clears a Story’s bars.

A photo that isn’t 9:16 can’t fill the frame untouched. Either the whole photo shows with empty space above and below it, or it is enlarged until it fills the frame and loses its sides. The share is the same both ways: a photo that keeps 70% of its width when enlarged fills 70% of the height when it isn’t.

Through Meta’s Page Stories API, which tools use to post Stories to a Facebook Page, a photo can be a JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF or TIFF of up to 10 MB, and Meta suggests keeping PNG files under 1 MB. Hootsuite’s guide gives a larger 30 MB ceiling. A high-quality 1080 × 1920 JPEG is usually well under either, so the limits rarely bite.

Tip: Shooting a photo just for a Story? Many phone cameras offer a 9:16 or full-screen setting. Use it and the photo goes up uncropped, with nothing to resize.

How long a video Story can be depends on who posts it and why. The pages we checked give these figures:

Read Meta’s API page closely: its specification table says 3 to 90 seconds, but the same page states that a video Story cannot exceed 60 seconds. Plan for 60.

Ads run longer but get cut up. Meta splits a Stories video ad of more than 15 seconds into separate cards, plays the first one to three on its own and then asks viewers whether to watch the rest. Put the product and the point in the first 15 seconds, since only the opening cards play without a tap.

Tools that schedule Page Stories publish them through Meta’s Page Stories API, and its video requirements are specific:

• Frame: 9:16, with 1080 × 1920 recommended and 540 × 960 as the minimum.
• Frame rate: 24 to 60 frames per second.
• Video: MP4 recommended, compressed with H.264 or H.265 (VP9 and AV1 also work), 4:2:0 chroma subsampling and a closed GOP of 2 to 5 seconds.
• Audio: AAC Low Complexity at 48 kHz and at least 128 kbps.
• Fresh media only: a photo or video that was already used in a published post can’t be reused for a Story.

Most of that matches a standard H.264 export preset. The GOP line is the one people rarely touch: it means a full keyframe every 2 to 5 seconds, which you set as the keyframe interval in an editor’s advanced export options.

Meta’s ads guide puts Stories video ads at 1440 × 2560 pixels, a third larger each way than 1080 × 1920. Files can be MP4, MOV or GIF, as large as 4 GB. The ratio tolerance is only 1%, so export exactly 9:16 rather than a shape that is merely close.

Meta and Sprout Social both give 250 pixels as the minimum width. Treat that as the floor that keeps an ad running, not a size to aim for: stretched across a phone screen, a file that narrow looks blurred.

The words of the ad sit outside the video. Meta suggests up to 125 characters of primary text and a 40-character headline, so the picture itself can stick to one idea.