Sizing Images

From the picture you choose to display as your brand’s Facebook profile picture to photos that you attach to Tweets you publish from your company’s Twitter account, images are a very important part of social media marketing. Research shows that multimedia content is much more engaging to social media users than strictly text-based content, and engaging your brand’s audience on social media is crucial for building and maintaining an effective social media marketing campaign for your company.

In order to make sure that the images you incorporate into your brand’s social media presence contribute effectively to your company’s social media marketing campaign, it’s important to make sure that all of the images you publish are sized correctly. If the images you post on social media are not sized correctly, they will likely be displayed as oddly cropped, low-quality, distorted, and unprofessional as a whole—which can lead to your followers losing interest in paying attention to and engaging with your brand’s social media posts.

Sizing images to post on social media might seem simple, but it can actually be very confusing. Sizing images via social media gets even more frustrating for companies who want to publish the same images across multiple different social media platforms, as the ideal image specs differ among different social media platforms. To make matters worse, these ideal image specs consistently change even within the same platform.

It’s important to size the images you post on your brand’s social media accounts to make them look their very best to your audience, but doing so doesn’t have to drive you crazy. In 2020, say goodbye to image-sizing frustration by using this quick and easy guide to sizing your brand’s images to fit perfectly on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter—which are 3 of the top platforms that brands utilize in their social media marketing campaigns to promote their products or services.

Instagram

Instagram is a photo-based platform first and foremost, so it’s especially important to get your image sizing right on Insta.
Your brand’s Instagram profile picture is displayed as a small circle at the top of your profile and shows up on your followers’ home pages on the top left side of every picture you post. The ideal Insta profile pics are square images that measure 110 x 110 pixels. The pictures you post to your company’s Instagram can be either square or rectangular. Square images that you post should measure 1080 x 1080 pixels and rectangular images that you post should maintain a 4-to-5 vertical-to-horizontal ratio to look their best when they are displayed on your followers’ home pages.

Facebook

Facebook has very specific requirements for image sizing. Your company’s Facebook profile picture should be square, but it shows up to your Facebook friends and followers as a circle at the top of your profile. This profile picture must measure a minimum of 180 x 180 pixels.

A cover photo will also be displayed like a banner at the very top of your brand’s Facebook profile. Make sure that the image you choose for your brand’s Facebook cover photo measures at least 820 x 312 pixels to prevent distortion.

Any pictures that you post via your company’s Facebook account should measure at or close to 1,200 x 630 pixels in order to look their very best.

Twitter

Your company’s Twitter account should have a profile picture and header image that represent your brand. Consider using your logo as your header image, but avoid using any words in your profile picture because it will show up very small on Twitter and likely just look cluttered.

The ideal Twitter profile picture is a square image that measures 400 x 400 pixels. Again, keep in mind that once you publish your Twitter profile picture, it will show up as a circle—so try to choose an image with a central focal point.

Twitter headers show up as a rectangular image at the very top of your profile—right above your bio. Your brand’s Twitter header will look best if you choose an image that measures 1,500 x 500 pixels. When Twitter users visit your brand’s profile, your circular profile picture will cover a small portion of the bottom left of your rectangular header photo. Keep this in mind and choose a header photo that does not include any important words or imagery near the very bottom of the photo.

Sizing images on Twitter can be especially tough because they are displayed at a smaller size as your followers scroll by them on their home pages, but they are displayed in an expanded size when your followers choose to click on them to take a closer look. Make sure any images you include in your Tweets maintain high quality when displayed at any size between 440 x 220 pixels (smaller un-expanded size) and 1024 x 512 pixels (larger expanded size).

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