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Corporate video length: how long depends on where it plays

September 2026 · Video production · Quebec

There is no single ideal length for a corporate video. There is an ideal length per destination. A video in a LinkedIn feed, a video on a home page, a video sent into a buying committee and a video looping at a trade show booth are four different jobs. The useful question is not how many minutes. It is where the viewer sees it, and what that viewer has to do next. Plenty of industrial companies in Quebec own a five-minute film nobody finishes, because that question was never asked before the shoot.

Exactly one official ideal-length figure exists across the two big ad platforms, and it belongs to LinkedIn. Everything else is judgment, not rule. This page keeps the two apart: what the platforms document, and what stays a business decision.

Four destinations, four lengths

The LinkedIn feed

This is the only destination where a platform publishes a length recommendation. On its advertising specifications page, LinkedIn recommends videos that are "15-30 seconds long, so they can qualify for all possible placements". Read the reason, not just the number: it is about placement eligibility, not about engagement. A longer video still runs, it simply closes doors on itself. The same page notes that in-stream ads run "up to 90 seconds in length".

For a plant manager scrolling between two meetings, that technical constraint lines up with a human one. He is not looking for your video. He runs into it. Twenty seconds showing a part come off a press, with the problem it solves named out loud, does the job. A three-minute company history does not, even when it is the better film.

The home page

No platform publishes a length for a website video, so judge it by its function. Someone on your home page is not deciding to buy. They are deciding whether to keep reading. The video has to answer one thing: does this company do what I am looking for, and does it look capable of doing it at my scale. Short, no title sequence, no mission statement up front. What comes after is pages and documents, not a second video.

The proof video sent into a buying process

Here the logic flips. The viewer asked for the information. You are on a shortlist, that person has to defend the choice to a committee, and they are looking for material to do it with. A buyer evaluating a supplier will watch four minutes if the four minutes answer their questions: real capacity, quality control, lead times, what happens when a part comes back out of tolerance. Length is not the problem. Padding is.

This is the format where a testimonial shot inside the client's own plant outperforms a corporate film. The committee is not listening to your president praise your rigour. It is listening to a comparable customer describe what went wrong and how it got fixed.

The trade show loop

At a booth, length is nearly irrelevant. Nobody arrives at the start. There is no usable sound. A visitor watches three to five seconds while walking, then decides whether to stop. So a booth loop is built with no opening, no ending and no dependence on shot order. Every segment has to stand alone, with text on screen, and the loop can run eight minutes without anyone noticing.

What the platforms accept, placement by placement

The technical ceilings are far wider than people assume, which proves the platform is almost never the constraint. LinkedIn accepts video ads from three seconds to 30 minutes, in MP4, between 75 KB and 500 MB, in four aspect ratios: 16:9 from 640 x 360 to 1920 x 1080 px, 1:1 from 360 x 360 to 1920 x 1920 px, 4:5 from 360 x 450 to 1080 x 1350 px, and 9:16 from 360 x 640 to 1080 x 1920 px.

One requirement on that page belongs in the pre-production conversation rather than the post-mortem: captions are optional, but if you supply them they "must be in SRT format". Put the .srt file in the deliverables list of your quote. A studio that hands you subtitles burned into the picture has not given you what LinkedIn expects, and redoing the export costs a day nobody budgeted.

On Meta, specs change by placement, so the placement has to be named next to the number. For the Facebook Feed, the official page states a 4:5 aspect ratio, 1440 x 1800 pixel resolution, a duration of one second to 241 minutes and a maximum file size of 4 GB, in MP4, MOV or GIF. For the Instagram Feed, the same documentation states a 9:16 aspect ratio, 1080 x 1920 pixel resolution and a duration of one second to 60 minutes. Reels ads are documented as "Less than 90 seconds", full-screen 9:16.

A 241-minute video is accepted by the Facebook Feed. Nobody should publish one. That is precisely the point: the technical limit tells you nothing about the right length, only what the system refuses.

One shoot day, several lengths

If length follows destination, then delivering a single length is a planning failure, not an editing failure. The fix is not to shoot four times. It is to shoot once, knowing in advance how many outputs have to come out of it.

That is how the Signal Program is structured. A production delivers 3 videos of about 1 minute plus 6 short clips of 15 to 30 seconds, in all formats. Those 15 to 30 second clips land exactly inside the window LinkedIn recommends for placement eligibility. The one-minute pieces carry the page and the follow-up. That is not a coincidence: the deliverables list is written before the shoot, not in front of a hard drive after the crew has left.

The same discipline applies to an industrial mandate. With Mecart, the series ran to 14 project videos across 10 states and provinces. Every trip had to produce more than one film. I shoot the videos and run the ad accounts myself, which removes a common failure: whoever decides the framing already knows which placement the shot ends up in, and in which aspect ratio.

A running time is not an aesthetic choice. It is the consequence of a distribution decision made before the camera leaves its case.

When this does not apply

If your video exists to be shown in a room, by a salesperson, to three people sitting in front of him, ignore everything above. No algorithm is involved. No placement rule applies. Length is set by the conversation: the salesperson stops the video when someone asks a question, restarts it, skips a section the client already understood. In that setting an eight-minute video cut into chapters often beats a 90-second one, because it supports an exchange instead of being consumed.

Same for an internal training capsule, a message from the president to his teams, or a technical demonstration an existing customer asked for. Those videos have a captive audience. The right length is the one that covers the subject, and nothing more.

The question to ask before you shoot

Before discussing minutes with a studio, write three lines: where the video will play, who watches it, and what that person has to do immediately afterwards. The lengths mostly derive themselves from there, and so does the deliverables list. It is also what makes quotes comparable, as covered on the page about corporate video pricing in Quebec, where running time turns out to be the variable that moves the number least.

The full logic, from framing a shoot to putting it into campaign, is on the video and content production page.

Sources

If you have to lock a running time this week, book the strategy call and we will start from where the video is going to play.

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