The world of social media is a crowded space, but with strong and relevant imagery, your brand will stand out. Using visual content in social media posts attracts and engages followers, expresses your brand, and helps lead to brand recognition in your audience’s minds. That’s why we put together a guide of the optimal social media image sizes for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Pinterest, and WordPress blogs. These are our recommended image sizes as of July 2020, but remember that social media platforms are constantly updating, and optimal photo sizes can change.
First and foremost, we recommend that you use 72 dpi as an image resolution. 72 dpi is a standard, quality resolution for web pages and will look clear on screens. A resolution that is any lower than 72 dpi will be blurry. Scale your image to 72 dpi at actual size (100%) before doing any sort of editing.
Facebook:
Facebook continues to be the world’s most popular social network, with over 2.6 billion monthly active users and 1.73 billion daily users. Optimizing your images for this major platform is key! Facebook posts that include a photo receive an average of 37% increase in engagement.
When uploading images for Facebook ads, take note that this social network prefers that ad images are covered by no more than 20% text. The more text that is on an ad, the more limited its reach will be. Facebook offers the option for you to upload your image ahead of time to see if it passes the 20% guideline or if it will have restricted reach.
Below we’ve outlined optimal sizes for Facebook’s variety of image opportunities:
Facebook Profile Picture Size: 180 x 180 px
Facebook Cover Photo Size: 820 x 312 px
Facebook Event Image Size: 1920 x 1080 px
Facebook Timeline Photos Size: 1200 x 630 px
Facebook Stories: 1080 x 1920 px
Instagram:
Boasting over 1 billion monthly active users and 500 million active daily users, Instagram is another major player in the social media world. Instagram is all about photos, so ensuring their quality and optimal size is important for your personal or company brand. Use the below sizes as guides to create your Instagram images:
Instagram Profile Picture Size: 110 x 110 px
Instagram Photo Sizes:
1080 x 1080 px (Square)
1080 x 566 px (Landscape)
1080 x 1350 px (Portrait)
Instagram Stories Size: 1080 x 1920 px
Instagram IGTV Video Size: 1080 x 1920 px – Best to keep it vertical
Mobile is rising as the medium through which people access their social media sites. Here’s an insider tip: post vertical and square images on Facebook and Instagram so your photos will take up the maximum space available in people’s social media feeds as they scroll on their phones and tablets.
Twitter:
Tweets with images consistently get retweeted more than those without, in fact 35% more! It’s worth getting your images right on Twitter. The below size guidelines will help you do just that.
Twitter Profile Picture Size: 400 x 400 px
Twitter Header Size: 1500 x 500 px
Twitter Shared Image Size: 1024 x 512 px
Twitter Card Image Size: 1200 x 628 px
LinkedIn:
This social network that’s specifically designed for career professionals to connect is highly trafficked, with 675 million monthly users. 40% of monthly active users log onto the site daily! Don’t let your brand miss out on taking advantage of this continuously growing platform. Fun fact—LinkedIn profiles with photos get 21x more views and 36x times more messages, so what are you waiting for? Check out our image size guide here:
Company pages:
LinkedIn Profile Picture Size: 300 x 300 px
LinkedIn Cover Photo Size: 1536 x 768 px
Timeline Image Size: 1200 x 628 px
Personal pages:
LinkedIn Profile Picture Size: 400 x 400 px
LinkedIn Cover Photo Size: 1584 x 396 px
YouTube:
YouTube is the video sharing giant. As the quality and length of YouTube videos are very important, so are the little details of your page. Things like your profile picture size and channel cover photo contribute to getting people to land on your brand’s page. Stick with these optimal image sizes for your best results:
YouTube Channel Cover Picture: 2560 x 1440 px
Profile Picture: 800 x 800 px
Video Thumbnail: 1280 x 720 px
Pinterest:
Like Instagram, visual imagery is what Pinterest is all about. Its users save and share images and videos that appeal to them, so strong images are immensely important here. Pinterest was specifically designed to best fit vertical images, so keep that in mind as you’re planning your imagery. Vertical photos will appear physically larger to users too, which will make your brand’s imagery stick out from your competition.
Pinterest Profile picture: 180 x 180 px
Pinterest Board Display image: 340 x 340
Pinterest Standard Pin size: Vertical images 1000 x 1500 (2:3 aspect ratio)
Square Pin: 1000 x 1000
WordPress Blog Posts:
Pairing images with your blog will help you draw readers in. We’re here to give some helpful tips about your blog post photos.
As usual, make sure the photos are 72 dpi. Photos with a resolution lower than 72 dpi will appear blurry, whereas photos higher than 72 dpi may slow your blog’s loading time which would take away from the user experience.
Do not scale your photos down too small and then try to re-enlarge them for display.
For WordPress Featured Images at the top of your blog post, we recommend the following:
WordPress Featured Image Size: 1200 x 628 px
Now that you’ve learned what image sizes to use, what file type is best for you to use? Here’s a run down on some of the most common file types.
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group): JPEG is the most popular choice for projects on the web, but also works for projects that require printing at a high resolution. The compression ratio in these files is adjustable, so you can select the level of quality you want in your image. JPEGs are known for their “lossy” compression, which means that the quality of the image decreases as the file size decreases.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics): PNG is a popular format used by photographers and graphic designers. These files can be shared on the web. PNGs are “lossless” meaning that they can’t lose quality when you edit them, though they are still low resolution and aren’t good for print. PNGs can also be transparent. This means that you can easily overlay a PNG image into a background, making for a much sharper image for the web.
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format): These files can add a fun and attention-grabbing aspect to your social media images. GIF files are moving images on the web, but they are limited to 256 colors. The biggest downside to GIF files is that the data compression that happens when you save them decreases the quality of the images.
Stick with these tips and image sizes, and your social media pages will be ready to go with optimal image sizes and quality!