Social Media Cheat Sheet

Yes, social media presence has become a “must have” for businesses large and small.  When watching our client’s analytics in their email distribution and their Google Analytics accounts…a great deal of click-thru rates are social referrals.

One of the best ways to improve your social media presence is making sure that you are consistent in your voice and branding.  And one thing that is crucial to this is through your visual design.

However, we ask the question why oh why does social media change their sizes all the time?  Just as soon as we get used to each platform’s rules and size requirements they change again and again!  So we have put together a little cheat sheet for you to take the guess work out!

This cheat sheet offers a brief guide providing image size recommendations for top social media sites that include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and Medium.  Our goal is to provide you with this info to be easily at your fingertips!

Let’s start with Profile Pictures

** YouTube calls these “channel icons.”

Cover Photos

Content Images in Posts

Rich content sharing, including image sharing, is increasingly important across social networks. Creating imagery that is the right size for the network minimizes distortion and unexpected cropping.

Shared Link Graphic Sizes

A very common question that is asked is “why is Facebook choosing that image on this link?” or “why don’t my share images look the way they are supposed to?”

Two reasons:

You need to make sure the social network knows which image you want it to highlight when you share a link. This can be done with Open Graph tags or other metadata.

Also you need to make sure the images included in a page or post are the size that the social network expects. If the shape of image isn’t right for the social network, it will often distort or ignore that image.

Hope this helps you be consistent with your brand in social media!