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LinkedIn B2B video format: what to actually produce

September 2026 · Advertising · Quebec

The format of a LinkedIn B2B video is not a matter of taste. LinkedIn publishes its specifications and they fit in a few lines: MP4 file, between 75 KB and 500 MB, three seconds to 30 minutes long, four accepted aspect ratios, captions in SRT. On that same page, LinkedIn recommends videos "15-30 seconds long, so they can qualify for all possible placements". That is the only official ideal-length figure in existence. The rest of this page turns those numbers into a production sheet for an industrial or B2B company in Quebec.

It is written to be printed and handed to whoever is shooting. Every number comes from an official LinkedIn page, with the link and the date at the bottom. And where LinkedIn's own two pages contradict each other, which happens on two points, this page says so instead of splitting the difference.

What to shoot

Length decides everything else. LinkedIn recommends 15 to 30 seconds so a video qualifies for all possible placements. That is not creative advice, it is an eligibility condition written by the platform. A 15 to 30 second piece gets in everywhere. A three minute piece gets into fewer places.

For a manufacturer, that means dropping the corporate video mindset and thinking in units instead. A production line running, framed on the one gesture that makes your process different: 20 seconds. The operations manager explaining why a part comes out at the tolerance the customer asked for: 25 seconds. A supplier introducing the person a prime contractor's buyer will actually deal with, name, role, what they answer for: 20 seconds. Three units, three messages, three things you can test in the ads manager.

That is the logic of the Signal Program, which delivers 3 videos of about 1 minute plus 6 short clips of 15 to 30 seconds per cycle, in all formats. The short clips are cut to LinkedIn's own recommendation. The one minute pieces work elsewhere: service page, email, sales meeting. I shoot them myself, and what a shooting day looks like is laid out in a real shoot day.

One exception worth knowing: in-stream ads run up to 90 seconds according to the same specifications page. If your piece goes past 30 seconds, know why.

How to cut it

LinkedIn accepts four aspect ratios, each with its own pixel range.

The consequence lands on the shoot, not on the edit. Frame wide and leave air at the top and on the sides: one take has to come out in 1:1 and in 4:5 without cutting off a head or the logo on a hard hat. The Signal Program shoots in 12K cinema resolution for exactly that reason, so there is room left to reframe without degrading the image.

The file boundaries: three seconds minimum, 30 minutes maximum, 75 KB minimum, 500 MB maximum. The two limits interact, and weight is what stops you first. Nobody delivers 30 minutes under 500 MB at a decent bitrate. Treat 500 MB as the real ceiling and the duration limit as a formality. Video codec: H.264 or VP8. Audio: AAC or MPEG4, sound rate under 64 KHz, as the page writes it.

Captions in SRT, and what that means in Quebec

LinkedIn's help page is categorical about the format: captions "Must be in SRT format". The ads guide, for its part, lists captions as optional. Both hold together: you are not obliged to supply captions, but if you do, SRT is the only accepted format. Another caption format, or subtitles burned into the picture, is not a substitute for the SRT.

The official API documentation goes further, and this is the sentence to keep. For an ads video with captions enabled: "caption processing must succeed for the video to be eligible for serving". For a feed video, the video still serves even if caption processing fails. In other words, a malformed SRT does not degrade your ad, it stops it from running.

Now the practical part for a Quebec company. The same documentation states that a video can carry only one caption file, and that, in the version fetched today, only English-language captions are supported at that API layer. That is the API constraint, not necessarily what Campaign Manager does, which I did not verify today. Two consequences for your production plan. A bilingual market is served with two cuts, one per language, each with its own caption file, never with a single bilingual file. And before committing to a full series, confirm inside Campaign Manager that your French SRT is accepted.

On substance, captions are not a comfort feature. A video in a feed gets judged with the sound off first, and a plant shot with no sound says nothing: the sentence from the operations manager is what carries the message. I cut every clip so it reads silently, and the SRT ships with the video rather than as an add-on.

LinkedIn's two official pages disagree

Here are the two gaps, with both sources.

Frame rate. The help page says "Less than 30 FPS". The ads guide says "Recommended frame rate: 30 frames per second". Build to the stricter one and deliver under 30 frames per second. Shooting at 24 or 25 frames per second satisfies both wordings.

Introductory text. The help page gives 150 characters recommended and 3,000 maximum. The ads guide gives 150 recommended and 600 maximum. Same rule: write for 150, never go past 600. The other limits do agree: ad name up to 255 characters, headline up to 70 characters to avoid truncation with 200 maximum, landing page URL up to 2,000 characters.

Writing 2,000 characters of intro text on the strength of the more permissive page means risking a block on the morning the campaign was supposed to launch. When two official pages diverge, the strict version is the only one that passes in both cases.

What the platform accepts on the campaign side

LinkedIn documents seven campaign objectives: BRAND_AWARENESS, ENGAGEMENT, JOB_APPLICANTS, LEAD_GENERATION, WEBSITE_CONVERSIONS, WEBSITE_VISITS and VIDEO_VIEWS. They sit in three groups: Awareness (Brand awareness), Consideration (Website visits, Engagement, Video views) and Conversions (Lead generation, Website conversions, Job applicants). The objective restricts the formats: Video views only opens Video Sponsored Content and Video Carousel Sponsored Content. Website conversions requires the LinkedIn Insight Tag to be installed so the platform can track conversion events and optimise toward them.

What you get charged for is a separate choice from the objective. LinkedIn documents CPM, the cost per thousand advertising impressions; CPC, the cost of each individual click on the link; CPV, the cost per view for video ads; and for Sponsored Messaging a cost per send, measured as CPM x 1000. Four bidding families exist: auto, manual, target cost and cost cap.

What the budget does while you sleep

The daily budget resets at midnight UTC. LinkedIn puts it plainly: campaigns run until daily ad spend reaches the daily budget limit, then at midnight UTC the daily budget resets and the campaign runs again the next day. Midnight UTC is not midnight where you are. The counter restarts in the evening, Quebec time, not at the end of your calendar day. Two concrete consequences: a campaign switched on in the morning here starts inside a UTC day that is already well under way and can spend its full budget in a few hours; and late-evening activity in Quebec already counts toward the next day in the report. When a daily figure refuses to line up with your calendar, that is almost always why.

LinkedIn can charge up to 150% of the daily budget. The documentation says it without hedging: LinkedIn can charge you up to 150% of your daily budget if there are great opportunities in the auction for you on a single day. The daily budget is a pace, not a ceiling. The only firm ceiling comes from a fixed schedule, where total spend is capped at the number of days of campaign flight time multiplied by the daily budget. Always present a LinkedIn budget to management over the full length of the mandate, never as a daily figure that one strong auction day will make a liar of you.

When none of this applies

A company whose buyers are five named people at three customers does not need a LinkedIn video campaign. It needs a phone call and a shop visit. At that scale, advertising is a slow and expensive way to reach people whose numbers you already have. The money is better spent on the trip, on an on-site demonstration and on a clear spec sheet.

The same reasoning holds for a subcontractor booked solid for eighteen months, and for a company that sells mostly through tenders, where compliance with the specification decides before reputation does. LinkedIn video becomes useful when your market holds more buyers than you can visit, and those buyers do not know you yet. If you can name them all on one sheet of paper, keep your budget. And if what is missing is the leader's credibility rather than reach, that is a different job, covered in the executive authority video.

The wider production frame is on the video production and content page. The ad accounts, on Meta, LinkedIn and Google, I run myself, aimed at decision makers.

Sources

If you want to go through what your team should actually shoot this quarter, take 15 minutes.

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