What Size Should Images Be on Social Media?

Seventy-six percent of U.S. consumers say they’ve purchased a product they saw in a brand’s social media post. Similarly, three out of four consumers say they’ve discovered a new local offering based on recommendations and posts on social media. The data speaks for itself: you’re missing out if your multi-location business isn’t leveraging social media to its fullest potential. 

While building a robust local social strategy takes time, you don’t want things like using the wrong image size to throw off your engagement or visibility. That’s where this piece comes in. We’ll break down the image sizes your brand should use on all leading social media platforms. 

For each social platform, we’ll share image sizes for organic posts, your profile picture, ads, and more, if applicable. Note that although a top social media platform, TikTok is omitted since it leverages video content over images. 

1. Facebook and Instagram 

Since Facebook has the most extensive audience base with 2.96 billion monthly active users, we’ll start here! 

These recommendations are based on information directly from Facebook. It’s also worth noting that Facebook can crop images if they’re too big but won’t stretch them. 

Like Facebook, Instagram notes that when you upload a picture, they try to ensuremake sure it isto upload it to the best quality resolution (up to a width of 1080 pixels) possible. Images uploaded to Instagram must also have an aspect ratio between 1.91:1 and 4:5. 

2. Twitter

Twitter is another popular platform for social media users, with 450 million monthly active users. While in-feed image sizes are the same for both Facebook and Instagram, they vary for Twitter.

Twitter posts are limited to 280 characters, so the image is important! Often, the image can tell a story you cannot tell with the limited character count, so ensuring you have the right image sizes is critical. 

3. LinkedIn 

Last but not least, let’s take a look at LinkedIn. LinkedIn can help your business recruit top talent, stay updated on industry trends and competitors, and gives you a place to showcase your products and services to potential clients and investors. 

The layout of LinkedIn pages varies from other social media platforms. When listing image sizes, we reference the “Life Tab,” which is highlighted below. The Life Tab allows you to feature information about your business, such as:

• Company photos
• Culture highlights
• Company leaders
• Employee perspectives and testimonials 

Now that you understand where the “Life Tab” is and its importance, let’s get into the details of photo sizes for LinkedIn. 

Start Dominating Your Local Social Efforts

While it’s essential to understand what image sizes you should use when creating social content, developing a local social strategy is equally important. Our Localized Social Content Guide shares tips and tricks businesses can use to create a winning local social strategy. 

Additionally, multi-location businesses are often intimidated by the thought of managing social efforts across 100s or 1,000s of business locations. SOCi Social can help. SOCi’s social media management solution enables multi-location businesses to manage and deploy localized content at scale while maintaining brand consistency at both the enterprise and local levels. 

Request a demo to learn more about how SOCi can help you dominate your local social efforts.