YouTube Video Thumbnail Best Practices

Here are four YouTube video thumbnail best practices that will put your thumbnails to work for you.

1. Keep It Simple
YouTube thumbnails are not the place to write a summary of your video. They’re small. When you consider that more than 70% of YouTube’s watch time comes from mobile devices, they get even smaller. To counteract that, your thumbnail shouldn’t include a ton of text.

Instead of adding your full YouTube video title to the thumbnail, try condensing the title down into a few important words over a background or image.

2. Keep It Relevant
Just like any search engine, YouTube rewards content that answers viewers’ queries. That means your thumbnail should be relevant to what your video is about and should include keywords to communicate important information to potential viewers. The thumbnail is meant to entice viewers to click, but if you don’t follow up with what you’re promising, your bounce rates are going to increase and YouTube is going to rank your video lower.

3. Keep It High Contrast
To really grab attention, you’ll want to use high contrast colors in your thumbnail. No blacks, whites, or reds since they tend to blend in with YouTube’s branding. Try sticking with blue, green, orange, and yellow to make your videos pop. You can even search the target keyword for your video and use a color that contrasts with what the majority of your competitors are using.

4. Keep It Branded
You’re working with limited real estate, so you may be tempted to leave your logo off of your thumbnails. Don’t do it! Your logo can boost brand awareness. You’ll want to include your logo so that it’s conspicuous, but doesn’t draw too much attention. Try adding your logo to a corner of the thumbnail. Don’t add it to the lower right corner, though, or it will be covered by the video length.

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