Social media image sizes can be confusing, even for seasoned designers and content pros. From profile images, cover photos, photo galleries, to TikTok sponsored ads and banner images — it’s a lot of assets to continually produce, keep track of, approve and get out the door.
Plus, to maintain brand integrity, imagery and design must be consistent across all of these different sizes. Producing and approving every single social media image size and version of campaign even within a single platform--let alone across many different platforms--requires not only extra creative lift from your content and design team, but also a rigorous and consistent approval process.
Furthermore, the creative production process for social media images sizes is both wide-ranging and rapid. Due to the immediate nature of social media content, your design and creative team must often quickly turn around a large volume of assets for different platforms. Ensuring each one is formatted properly from the start saves your creative team hours of potential work and can speed up delivery timelines. There's seemingly no end to the production needs of social campaigns.
In this piece, we'll provide an image sizes cheat sheets that includes current image dimensions for the most popular social media platforms to help your team create high quality social media images faster.
When you finish reading this post, you’ll be well prepared to produce images for social media. We hope this piece will be a rich resource for you as you prepare social media images for your content campaigns.
Facebook is the world’s biggest social media network with approximately 2.94 billion monthly active users.
The design and image dimensions on Facebook are constantly changing. Take a look at common Facebook image sizes for your page or profile:
Profile pictures for personal user accounts appear above an individual's name, in a small circle, as shown above.
Your profile picture appears when a user searches for your profile, when you post to other people's Facebook profiles, or when you comment on posts.
Not long ago, Facebook modified the profile image for business pages to appear on the left side of the screen. This new look helps differentiate business pages from personal accounts, even though the image dimensions are the same.
Your Facebook cover photo is the larger photo situated above your profile picture, or to the right of your profile picture, if you have a business page. It appears only on your Facebook timeline.
Since a Facebook cover photo is much larger than your profile picture, it gives you the liberty to use more expressive or detailed imagery.
A Facebook cover photo is the best way to highlight your brand's unique selling point and grab users' attention.
One of the most common actions on Facebook is sharing an image. Shared images appear on your timeline, and show up in most of your followers’ News Feeds — although, with the decline in organic reach, it’s doubtful everyone will see your post.
Another feature of Facebook is the ability to share a link. It’s similar to posting a shared image, but it gives you more display options.
Create a shared link with a small square image to the left and text on the right, or with a larger rectangular image on top with text underneath.
Facebook event images are a good way to attract users to your page and inform users about upcoming events.
Each time you want to send a reminder for an event, users see your event image.
Facebook has added the ability to create a fundraiser for charitable organizations or personal causes. The cover photo for these fundraisers varies slightly from a typical Facebook cover photo, with a minimum size of 400 x 150 pixels.
The best experience across many display types will come from a higher resolution image.
Instagram is a great place to connect with family, followers, friends, and new audiences via engaging video-based and image-based content.
Visuals are the heart of Instagram, which makes image guidelines even more important.
Your Instagram profile picture is the small circle users see when they arrive on your profile. Your profile picture also appears in search results as well as Instagram Explore, which recommends new profiles to follow, images to see, and videos to watch.
When somebody visits your profile, they can see all of your Instagram photos arranged in rows of thumbnails. These smaller depictions of your images and videos expand when clicked, and there's also space for people to comment.
Instagram is a visual medium, so uploading pictures of the right resolution and quality is essential.
The images are in a higher resolution when captured using the Instagram app. If you choose to upload an image or video from your device, the resolution will be much lower.
Instagram Stories are a fast, simple way to share experiences and moments. Stories are vertical, full-screen photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours.
With 229 million monetizable daily active users worldwide, Twitter is likely one of the social media networks your customers use to discuss your brand. And tweets with visual content are 3 times more likely to get engagement.
Read on to find common guidelines for Twitter image sizes.
Your Twitter profile picture is the main image above your profile name that represents you or your brand across the network. The header image is the larger image at the top of your profile.
Your profile picture is the most visible aspect of your Twitter presence, so it’s vital to get the social media specs right. Profile pictures appear on your home page and in the Twitter stream of your followers whenever you tweet.
The header photo is the place to tell people about what you do, display your business name, or ask users to follow you.
Twitter’s in-stream preview images highlight the visual content you share on the platform. Images for shared links are clickable, taking users to the source content.
In 2021, Twitter made waves with #Twittercropisgone, removing the sometimes-disadvantageous automated cropping for vertical photos that had become the subject of memes and in-jokes among the users of the platform.
Twitter might crop overly broad or tall photos with odd dimensions, but for most photos in standard 4:3 or 16:9 dimensions (or close to them), you will not have to worry as much about centering subjects to account for automatic cropping.
With 830 million members in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, LinkedIn is the world's biggest professional network.
When you use LinkedIn for business — whether it's through your personal profile or a company page — pairing your LinkedIn updates with photos is known to boost comments and sharing.
Here are the recommended social media image sizes for LinkedIn:
Your personal profile image appears when people click on your LinkedIn profile, or in search results, or when you share a post. The background picture appears behind your profile picture in the introduction section on your profile. Background pictures are key to making your profile appealing.
Your company logo appears beside your brand name on your LinkedIn homepage. This photo also appears in the “Companies you may want to follow” section.
The company background photo covers the complete top of a Business LinkedIn page. The photo appears larger than the personal background photo, giving businesses a bit more space.
If you expect that other LinkedIn users will share your posts,format your accompanying images to display correctly when users share your link.
Pinterest has over 454 million monthly active users worldwide. It may not be a useful social media platform for all types of businesses, but it’s an effective medium for companies that sell visually appealing products.
When creating your Pinterest account, you have the choice to do so using Twitter, Facebook, or email. If you select Twitter or Facebook, Pinterest will use the profile photo from one of those platforms.
If you choose not to sign up via Twitter or Facebook, or would prefer to use a different picture, you can do that too: Just upload a square photo (the bigger the better) and Pinterest will resize it to fit. Your profile picture on Pinterest should be closely tied to you or your brand.
When adding an image or "pin" to your board, Pinterest puts a limit on the width of the image but not the length. This gives you the chance to add a picture that is square or one that will scale to be taller.
From original short films and music videos to vlogs and cat videos, you can use YouTube to promote your unique content and brand. But apart from quality videos, you also need high quality and relevant image art and icons for your channel.
Your profile photo is visible to viewers on your channel, alongside your videos, and also when people search for your account on YouTube. Even if you upload your profile photo in a square format, it displays as a circle throughout the site. Center your photo or logo so it displays correctly in the circular image format.
Your cover photo — a banner image — appears on your main profile page above your profile photo.
Just as images are the main focus of platforms like Instagram, videos are the mainstay for YouTube.
Thumbnails provide viewers a quick glimpse of your video content. A good thumbnail persuades users to watch your video as they scroll through YouTube.
With 332 million daily active users as of April 2022, Snapchat is one of the most popular social media networks worldwide.
Snapchat gives businesses a visual way to connect with their audience. Snapchat Geofilters — text overlays that say something about an image and or location — can help businesses connect with mobile users who in turn may share those images to reach even more users.
Build buzz around your brand by placing a series of ads within Snapchat’s Discover section. Keep your content brief, engaging, and fun for maximum impact.
Images for Snapchat ads must follow the same guidelines as regular Snapchat images.
TikTok gained popularity in 2020, with many videos going viral and transforming the lives of creators. Today, there are at least 1 billion monthly active TikTok users internationally.
While TikTok is a video-based social media platform, it gives you the option to add a profile photo to represent your brand or product. The photo displays as a circle on your profile page.
TikTok videos form the bulk of your TikTok content, and proper formatting is a must, if you want users to share your content.
There are several types of images you can add to your Business Profile:
Logo: Helps your consumers identify your business on Google.
Cover photo: Depicts your business online.
Business photos: These highlight features of your business to attract and inform customers. Learn more about business photos.
Your photos look best on Google if they meet the following standards:
Social media images need to be formatted properly for maximum impact. Understanding social media image sizes, aspect ratios, and image resolution can help you create brand images that your target audience will notice, engage with, and share. With these cheat sheets, you can take the guesswork out of creating the right social media image sizes for your social media strategy and campaigns.
Want to improve the approval process once these social media image sizes are created? Learn how to get approval on many types of media files at once and create an efficient review and approval process for social content.