The world of social media images changes seemingly every 5 minutes. Sizes, best practice, types that get the best engagement and more. We’ve put this blog together as a handy one stop guide to everything you need to know for your social media images.

Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Marketing Industry Report 2021 shows that whilst video use increased in 2021, it doesn’t mean images aren’t still necessary.

Social Media Images Sizes 2022

Image sizes for social media change regularly and if you are posting on multiple platforms, the same image used on one platform may look distorted on another. You can use Canva‘s built-in image resizer to change your image size, although this can be resizing and tweaking elements.

Try and make your designs easily edited and layouts flexible enough to adapt to different formats such as horizontal, vertical or square depending on a platforms preference.

Facebook

Facebook handily keep their help center up to date with all the latest changes to image requirements. You can find:

• Ad placement image sizes
• Best practise for aspect ratios including templates
• Profile picture and cover picture sizes
• Post engagement sizes

Instagram

Instagram may seem simpler to get your head around due to their grid system, but certain aspects can be trickier. Like Facebook, Instagram have a handy help center too:

• Image resolution
• Creative optimisation for ads
• Instagram stories

Pinterest

Pinterest is literally fueled by images – everything you see on Pinterest is a visual window into the pin so it’s key to get them right. As well as being the right size, it’s arguably the most important platform to get the actual image right for as the accompanying text is only visible when clicking. Knowing the importance of this, Pinterest puts a lot of effort into communicating what users need to know:

• Creative best practises (this is very indepth and snazzy!)
• Ad images sizes
• Guidelines on image and pin content
• Trend predictor

Youtube

I know it’s a tad ironic to mention images on a video-sharing platform but images can be key in building your channel. From channel art to thumbnails, users interact with your images every time they watch a video. Being owned by Google, their help center is full of best practise articles and tips:

• Custom thumbnail best practices
• Profile picture guidelines
• Cover art guidelines
• Watermark guidelines

Twitter

Twitter has always been notorious for being tricky in terms of image sizes and gained lots of interest when they removed cropping of images in 2021. This change means it’s a lot easier to post on the platform but there are still key things you need to know. Twitter themselves have a really good information portal that gives all sorts of tips and tricks:

• Dos and Don’ts of Twitter images
• How to make images accessible
• Creative specs for Twitter ads
• Profile and header pictures

LinkedIn

LinkedIn does lend itself more heavily towards long-form content but images do have a place there too. Whether it’s for your cover photo, article photo, or just a standard post, you can utilise images quite cleverly on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has a wide range of support topics to help you navigate images on their platform:

• Image specs for career and brand pages
• Advertising image guidelines
• 10 tips for picking a good Linkedin profile picture
• Photo guidelines and conditions
• Photo requirements

I hope this one-stop guide has helped you learn more about the images you should be using on social media in 2022!

Ana x