Day 19 – Optimizing Images for Different Social Media Sites

We’ve been talking about social media sites for the past few days and I thought it was worth going over the best image sizes for each social media platform. While this is not an all-inclusive list, I’m covering the big 7 sites. For any other niche-specific social media sites you may be using, do a quick Google search to find the best images sizes.

Having the right size image for each social media site will help make your content shine and get you the best chance of having people share it.

Facebook – Facebook will pull up any images on your page and let you choose with one to display on your Facebook post. You also have the option to upload an image directly to Facebook and then include a link in the description. In either case, 1200 x 630 pixels is the image size you want to shoot for.

If you are hoping your readers will post and share links to your blog post on their Facebook profiles and pages, include an image of that size in each of your blog posts.

Twitter – The best size for images on Twitter is 440 x 220 pixels with a maximum file size of 5 MB. Since you’ll be uploading these to your tweets as you tweet about your posts, I recommend making a separate Twitter image (or even several if you’d like) and not including these in your posts.

Instagram – Instagram images are square so keep that in mind when you’re posting. The app will help resize and crop the images as needed. If you want to create them in your editing software and then upload them to the app/site, use 640 x 640 pixel images.

Pinterest – For Pinterest images, a 2:3 ratio of width to height seems to work best. Depending on your niche, you may want to play around with even taller images as well. The minimum image size is 100 x 200 pixels right now, but most images will be shown in the feed with a width of 236 pixels and the height is scaled. Expanded images (when you click on them) are up to 735 pixels wide.

Include a large image in a vertical orientation on your post to make it easy for visitors (and yourself) to pin right from your site.

YouTube – You don’t really have to use an image on YouTube (aside from your profile and cover images of course, but I thought it may be helpful to include the recommended images size for a custom thumbnail. The main thing is that you maintain the 16:9 image ratio. For best results use 1280 x 720 pixels for the custom thumbnail size.

Tumblr – Tumblr is another very visual social media platform. High-resolution photos will help here and you can upload images up to 10 MB large. Images will appear at 570 x 750 pixels which is a great starting point for your image size.