Social Media Image Size Guide

There’s no doubt that social media sites play an important role in people’s everyday lives. In December 2012, Facebook had 1.06 billion active monthly users and Twitter had 200 million active monthly users.

This shows that there is a huge potential audience in social media sites. It is therefore more important than ever for businesses to ensure that they have consistently branded imagery across all mediums, including social media sites.

Whilst creating images for social media we found that the individual sites don’t give any dimensions for the display of their images. Images can be uploaded in a variety of different sizes and shapes and without this information it ends up being hit and miss as to whether your image will turn out how you want it to.

When we were searching for dimensions we came across guides that included too much information and made the task seem more complicated than it is. We had a go at creating our own ‘Social Media Image Size Guide’ which contains what we deem to be the vital information needed for anyone (company or individual) who’d like to customise their profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and/or Pinterest with personalised images that fit perfectly.





Social Media Image Creation Process – How to Customise Facebook:

1. Choose your imagery – Make sure the images that you choose reflect your business and are branded appropriately.

This is the image we’ve chosen to use as our Facecook Cover Photo:





2. Create a document – Open a new document in your chosen program with guide-lines so that you can see which parts of the image will be cut off or covered. You can do this in programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator. (Or Paint.net and Gimp which are free photo editing programs)





3. Composition – Make sure all the important elements of your design are visible.



Think about how you could use the covered or cut off sections to your advantage.

For example: this Twitter background has elements which are covered when the user first visits the page (1) but are exposed once the used scrolls down (2). (The best screen resolution to design for is 1280 x 800)

(1)

(2)

Also, for the header image and profile picture on Twitter you can make it so that two images come together to form one image as in this example:





4. Save images – Save your images with a file name that involves your keywords and the company name/URL.



5. Upload images – Check that they look how you want them to.





6. You’re done! – Enjoy your newly customised Profile.



For more information on social media marketing visit our Social Media Marketing page.

If you need bespoke images creating for your social media properties, just contact us for a quote.

