A Comprehensive Guide and Optimization Tips For Social Media Image Sizes
As social media is evolving fast along with the demand for smart social media marketing, your social media business page or professional profile needs to be optimized as far as the profile pictures and cover photos are concerned. This article serves as a one-stop tutorial for all the tips to get your social media image sizes and dimensions optimized. Kindly continue reading to get the list of social media image sizes or cheat sheet for the top social networking sites.
Not being active on any social media website is considered as surprising in today's world. You will find that almost everyone has an account in one of the social media sites to stay connected with friends and family members as well as to maintain professional relations. Posting of images is quite common in these sites. If you want to optimize the social media platforms, it is important to use the right image size for the same. Right from Facebook to Twitter, from LinkedIn to Pinterest or even Instagram, having the right image size is important.
So, where can you find the right sizes to be used for images of your Facebook business page or Twitter page or Google+ page? In this article, we shall provide you with a list of steps for optimization of your social media images. You can follow some or all of the social media image size optimization guidelines shared here for better results with regards to your brand promotion, business product advertising, profile networking, etc.Importance of Images On Social Media
Having social media presence is not only for personal reasons. It is also required for business profiles, for creating pages for the business and services and for branding purposes. Without an appropriate image, the profile looks incomplete. Therefore using the right size image is very important for the profile in any social media site. If you are looking to make an impact through the social media profile, use appropriate size images. Along with the image size, the kind of image used is also important. For instance, for a business page, using images of people will not make that impact. Instead use the company logo or similar thing to draw eyeballs. Now social media sites are being widely accessed via smartphones. The images used should open on the mobile platform as well. Reference Guide to Image Specifications / Sizes for Different Social Networking Sites
Before uploading photos or images on any social networking site, people generally compress the images and upload them. The aim should be to use an optimal social media image size cheat sheet, which can referred for quick upload of your next Facebook cover photo or Twitter business page profile picture.
For Facebook profile picture, dimension of 180 x 180 pixels is perfect. This picture will be visible on your timeline, on the various posts where you comment or on timeline of other people where you post something (messages/images etc) and also on search results of Open Graph in Facebook etc.
Creative images that represent you or your business should be provided in the cover image. The minimum size of the cover photo should be 399 x 150 pixels. For the ideal Facebook cover photo, the image file size should be 100 KB with dimensions of 851 x 315 pixels.
For the Facebook shared image, dimensions of 1200 x 630 pixels should be ideal. By sharing useful images, you can engage more people in conversations and discussions on Facebook timeline. These images appear on the Newsfeed of followers and friends.
People on Twitter will identify you with your profile picture. Be careful in the image selection and ensure that it is of high quality. The profile picture will be seen on your home page and on Twitter stream of followers whenever you tweet. For the profile picture of your Twitter account, the dimension of 400 x 400 pixels is excellent. Maximum image file size for this should not be more than 100 KB.
The Twitter profile page should have high resolution and attractive header image. For business purposes, the header image should be in sync with the brand, tagline and logo. With maximum file size of 10 MB, the dimension of the header image should be 1500 x 500 pixels.
In-stream images – for animated GIFs, 3MB size file is good, though it can exceed to 5MB. The dimensions should be 440 x 220 pixels. It is possible to post four images with tweets. For each image, an image link is created.
LinkedIn is a social media platform for professional people. Ensure that the images used are embedded with the text to make the thing more contextual. Moreover, the banner image and the cover image should represent your brand and business so that getting connected with professionals is simpler.
For LinkedIn banner image, the dimensions could be 646 x 220 pixels, while for the standard logo, it could be 100 x 60 pixels. For your career cover picture on LinkedIn, you can keep the image dimensions to 974 x 300 pixels.
Your Google+ profile picture will be the image that shall appear all across the Google+ network. Though the image is uploaded as a square, it appears within a circle. The dimension of this Google+ image should be 250 x 250 pixels.
The Google+ cover picture is a larger image with business tagline, logo and brand identity. The most ideal dimensions are 1080 x 608 pixels.
For Google+ shared image, the suitable dimensions could be 497 x 373 pixels. This image can be shared in the Google circle. In fact, these images (with the text) appear in the Google search engine results when relevant queries are searched for business etc.
The Pinterest profile picture is not that important as the Facebook profile picture or the Twitter one. But, at the same time having a Pinterest profile photo with 165 x 165 pixels as dimensions, is good. The Pinterest board display images in 222 x 150 pixels should be eye catching and interesting so that they can be posted on various Pinterest Boards.
For the pin size, width of 236 pixels is fine. Though there might be some expanded pins, maximum width should not be more than 660 pixels. Larger images can be pinned for more engagement, likes and re-pins.
YouTube is mainly a video sharing site. Maintaining a resolution of 1280 x 760 pixels is good enough for uploading videos on the YouTube platform.
The size and dimensions of the YouTube channel cover image will vary for different devices. For desktops and TV, it is 2560 x 1440 pixels, for smartphones it is 1546 x 423 pixels and for tablets it is 1855 x 423 pixels. The image sizes are optimized for various platforms as the videos can be streamed on any of them.
Whether it is profile picture, photo thumbnails or photo size, the aspect ratio for Instagram images is 1:1. The images come in square dimensions. Image quality is very important on this photo sharing platform as limited content is shared via Instagram.
Dimensions of Instagram profile picture – 110 x 110 pixels
Dimensions of Instagram photo thumbnails – 161 x 161 pixels
Dimensions of photo size – 640 x 640 pixels
With this guide to the image sizes and dimensions for the top social media sites, you can now use perfect images in your social media platforms for optimum results. The above shared list is just to highlight the ideal image sizes for upload on social media sites. Check out any reputed business's page on social media and see how they adhere to the social media image sizing guidelines for best optimization results. Implement the right image size and see the results for yourself!
