Repurpose Video for LinkedIn: The Specs That Matter

LinkedIn accepts video from 1:2.4 to 2.4:1, up to 5 GB and 15 minutes long, in MP4 and a long list of other formats. A 9:16 Short uploads without complaint. But LinkedIn's own help pages warn that vertical video can be cropped at the top, bottom and sides — so a 4:5 variant is usually the safer repurpose.

Most clipping workflows stop at the vertical trio: Shorts, TikTok, Reels. LinkedIn sits next to them, takes the same file, and reaches people who will never watch a gaming montage but might sit through four minutes on pricing. The catch: "takes the same file" and "shows the same frame" are different promises, and LinkedIn is explicit about the difference.

What are LinkedIn's real video specs?

Two sets of numbers exist, and confusing them is the most common way a repurposed clip goes wrong. Organic posts follow the Help Center's sharing requirements; paid ads follow the tighter Marketing Solutions specs.

	Organic member post	Video ad
Aspect ratio	1:2.4 – 2.4:1	16:9, 1:1, 4:5, 9:16
Resolution	256x144 – 4096x2304	per-ratio ranges (below)
File size	75 KB – 5 GB	75 KB – 500 MB
Duration	3 s desktop / 2 s mobile – 15 min	3 s – 30 min
Frame rate	10 – 60 fps	30 fps recommended
Bit rate	192 Kbps – 30 Mbps	not published
Formats	MP4, MOV, AVI, WEBM, MKV, WMV and more	MP4
Captions	SRT attachment or auto captions	"Must be in SRT format"

Organic figures come from LinkedIn's video sharing troubleshooting page; ad figures from Video Ads Specifications and its matching help article. One wrinkle: video posted by a LinkedIn Page caps lower — the Page video specifications state "Max video duration - 10 minutes", not 15, and that "We no longer support AVI, QuickTime, or MOV files".

A typical Shorts export — 1080x1920, MP4, 30 fps, under a minute — clears all of that easily. The specs are not your problem. The framing is.

Should you post 9:16 or 4:5 on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn's ad specs list four ratios with pixel ranges:

• 16:9 landscape — 640 x 360 to 1920 x 1080
• 1:1 square — 360 x 360 to 1920 x 1920
• 4:5 vertical — 360 x 450 to 1080 x 1350
• 9:16 vertical — 360 x 640 to 1080 x 1920

One ratio does carry a label, on the ad side: LinkedIn's video ads help article marks "Vertical: 4:5 (.80) (Recommended ratio)". For an ordinary organic post, LinkedIn publishes a permitted range and no preferred ratio.

What LinkedIn does say concerns cropping. Its help page on full-screen vertical video: "Uploaded videos with a larger aspect ratio may be cropped on the sides as well as at the top and bottom. Videos with a wider aspect ratio may be fitted to the screen." It illustrates this with a picture rather than pixel numbers.

The practical read: 9:16 is accepted, sits inside the ad spec, and matches the full-screen experience LinkedIn describes as "the video tab and video carousel". 4:5 is the conservative choice for the ordinary scrolling feed — a shorter box, less to lose at the extremes. Making both is cheap if you kept the master. The arithmetic: a centred 4:5 window on a 1080x1920 frame is 1080 x 1350, spanning y = 285 to y = 1635. Everything outside that band is what you gamble with.

How long should a LinkedIn video be?

LinkedIn publishes no length benchmark for organic posts. If you have seen a confident "the ideal LinkedIn video is N seconds", check whether it traces back to LinkedIn or to a vendor's own account data. It is nearly always the latter, and the figures contradict each other.

The one length figure LinkedIn publishes sits on its video ad best practices page: "Keep videos short. Short-form videos are more likely to be watched to completion, with 7–15 second videos seeing up to a 300% lift in completion rates." Read the caveats honestly: paid media, completion rate rather than reach, "up to" doing quiet work, and no published baseline or sample.

The same page offers a rule that survives its own caveats better: "Show what you want your audience to see in the first 10 seconds of the video." A 45-second clip whose thesis lands at second three is a fine LinkedIn post. One that spends twenty seconds on a channel intro is not.

Where does LinkedIn's UI cover your frame?

The honest answer: LinkedIn does not publish a safe-area diagram. The pixel margins in "LinkedIn safe zone" templates come from third parties measuring the app, not from LinkedIn's documentation. They may be accurate today; nothing obliges them to stay accurate after the next release. You can rely on LinkedIn's crop warning above, plus a habit that costs nothing — keep every load-bearing pixel toward the centre.

Worked example: your Shorts template parks captions at 88% of frame height — y ≈ 1690 on a 1080x1920 export. Safe in the Shorts layout, and outside the centred 4:5 window, which ends at y = 1635. A 4:5 crop slices that caption block in half. Move captions to 72–78% of height (y ≈ 1380–1500) and they survive both. Same logic at the top for a title card — the same reasoning as where to put captions so YouTube's UI doesn't cover them.

Do LinkedIn videos need burned-in captions?

LinkedIn gives you two caption routes of its own. You can attach an SRT — its help page states "You must have an associated SRT (SubRip Subtitle) file attached to the video before it can be posted", done through the desktop share box. Or use auto captions, which LinkedIn says are "available for all LinkedIn members and Pages" and "currently supported in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Indonesian, Turkish, Arabic, and Dutch", with a toggle to switch off.

Both are useful. Neither travels: an SRT attached on LinkedIn does nothing for the same clip on TikTok, and the auto-caption language list is LinkedIn's, not yours. Burned-in captions travel with the file — one render, every destination. LinkedIn's engineering blog explains why: "We have found that our members do not want videos to automatically play with sound, but do want videos to unmute once they have been interacted with." Its ad tips put it plainly: "Think like a silent film director: a large portion of LinkedIn members will watch your ad with the sound off. Consider burning in video subtitles."

How do you make the LinkedIn cut without re-editing?

Plainly: Everpop does not post to LinkedIn — no LinkedIn scheduling, no LinkedIn approval queue, better said now than discovered later. What Everpop gives you is the file: your MP4 with word-by-word burned captions, plus an editor handoff export in FCPXML, EDL and SRT that puts a 4:5 variant one drag into Premiere or Resolve away, cut points intact, nothing to re-transcribe.

The repurpose checklist

• Keep the 1080x1920 master — export a variant, never overwrite
• Captions and titles inside the centred 4:5 band (y 285–1635)
• The point lands inside the first 10 seconds
• MP4, 30 fps, under 500 MB if it might ever run as an ad
• Captions burned in, not bolted on at upload
• Post text carries the hook — LinkedIn's feed is still a text feed
• Posting as a Page: 10-minute cap, and no MOV, AVI or QuickTime

Same clip, different room. The specs are generous; the framing is the work.