Social Media Marketing
We all know social media marketing plays an important role in almost all businesses. It helps connect customers with your brand and often potential customers will check your social media profiles before purchasing, or you will have helped drive a sale to your website from your social media efforts.
Social Media Graphics & Image Dimensions
How do you get your message out there, noticed and stand out from the crowd? Social media graphics can help achieve this on a much greater scale than text alone. However, as there any many different social media platforms, there are also multiple different social media image sizes. Image sizes that work for Twitter will not work the same for Facebook. For easiness sake we’ll just look at Twitter & Facebook for now but keep in mind that Google+, Pinterest etc. will all have different dimensions also.
The dimensions of your images are extremely important as this is how the platform will display your image. If your image is too big it may crop out a vital part of your message or if it’s too small it may look distorted. Both are bad for sharing or engagement which is your goal on social media. You only have an extremely limited period of time to entice social media users to see your message. I’m advising you now that if your image is out of proportion, cropped or distorted you are losing out as people are not going to engage with it as much as they could be.
Save time and hassle, tell us what social media graphics you need and we’ll sort them for you!
Here are some examples of how images can help reinforce your message or brand if sized correctly:
Social Media Graphics
- Social Media Covers & Branding for all platforms
- High Quality Images for use in Ads & Promotions
- All Images set to the correct dimensions
- Meta & Open Graph Tag alterations for better Sharing & Engagement
You can see in both images the text on both images & logos which are the most important are displayed. This is how they display in the Twitter feed also without the need to click & expand. This makes them infinitely more engaging and better for sharing.
Here are some examples of badly sized images which are not matching the correct dimensions and thus possibly damaging potential engagement:
As you can see in the first image (a Twitter tweet in the feed), a lot of the text on the image has been cropped out and would require a someone to click on the image to actually see the full message. This is what you should aim to avoid, your message should be clear without having to click on it. The second image is an easy enough mistake to happen, it’s a picture taken on a phone I presume but Twitter has chosen to focus on the wrong part of the image. Resizing your image before uploading it is best, or as quick fix take landscape photos instead of portrait as this is better for most social media platforms. Always be thinking how your image will display on Facebook, Twitter when put in a post/tweet etc.
On Facebook ensuring your image is the correct dimensions is vitally important also, particularly for adverts, profile pictures, cover images, newsfeed images and your Open Graph meta tags (image shown when a link on your website is shared). So many different variable sizes apply to each so often one image will not fit all.
Profile Photos & Cover Photos
Most social media platforms use a squared image for profile pictures. Usually this should be your business logo (high quality) and then use the cover photo to convey your brand’s image or latest offerings. If your logo is quite wide or tall you will need to ensure it has enough space around it in the background so that it displays fully without the need to click & expand.
A cover photo is the full width image (banner) that displays at the top behind your profile photo. This is an exceptional tool for use in social media marketing. You can instantly convey what your business or brand does as well as including a message.
Facebook Cover Example
Cover photos are vital marketing space which you can use to advertise to your fans and potential customers/visitors. Your message should be brief and the to the point, without adding too much text or distracting from calls to action such as the ‘contact us’ button shown above.
Twitter Cover Example
Keep it simple! e.g. if you have a special offer or discount that month you could display it there. Again, image sizes differ between platforms so we can create cover images that will fit perfectly without distracting visitors from your page or calls-to-action.
Social Media Meta Data & Cards
One of the most important elements of your social media marketing is to ensure that your meta data & Open Graph tags are correctly configured. These tags determine the information that is displayed across Facebook & Twitter when a link to your website is shared. This includes a few lines of text and a specified image (you can specify different images to appear for different platforms if preferred).
These tags make your content or links look much better on social media and therefore much more likely to be shared or engaged with. The great thing is once you set the tags you don’t have to do anything again, the image and text gets automatically generated (some examples below).
If you’d like to discuss us setting up similar graphics or tags for your website or business then contact us and we can give you plenty of options!
Example of Facebook post with meta description tag but no image tag
Example of Facebook post with meta description tag & image tag
Example of Twitter Card tweet with meta description & image tag
All of the above content & images were auto generated by our meta & open graph tags. Pretty handy, eh!? Get in touch if you’d like this for your webpages.