A friend once sent me a screenshot of my own video with the caption "your text is under the buttons." The upload had succeeded. The post was live. The platform never told me anything was wrong. That's how spec mistakes work: silent, common, fixable, and you find out from a friend.
Here's the hit list. Uploading the wrong aspect ratio and letting the platform crop blindly. Ignoring safe zones so the interface covers your text. Exporting at a bitrate so low the compression turns everything to mush. Forgetting the file size cap and having uploads fail silently. Using a square video where vertical was needed. Tiny text that's unreadable on phones. Thumbnails that don't match the video's actual dimensions.
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And number eight, the classic: the youtube banner size. The recommended upload is 2560 by 1440, but the visible safe area is way smaller, around 1546 by 423 in the center. Design for the safe area or your channel art is a surprise on every device. TVs, desktops, and phones all show different crops of the same image, and they will not coordinate with each other.
The root cause of all eight is the same: nobody memorizes the video size requirements by platform. They change, they differ, and your memory is not a system. A social media dimensions database by platform exists so you can look up the current number in five seconds instead of trusting what you remembered from 2023. Same habit for every other profile surface. The twitter header size, the Facebook cover, the LinkedIn banner. Check the crop before you upload, not after.
Our database tracks the current specs for every major platform, including the youtube banner size and safe areas, at easyimagevideo.com. And if you want it handled for you, one upload to our service comes back formatted for every platform.