As a business, leveraging social media is fundamental to your success. Inserting images into your posts is essential, since it has the power to make your content more exciting, to engage your current followers and attract new ones. But even more important than inserting images into your posts is to insert correctly sized images. Constantly adding incorrectly sized photos to your social posts indicates an unprofessional behavior and can have an impact on your future sales.
Why Resize Images for Social Media
Properly resizing your images before uploading them to your social media channels does truly matter.
Regardless of how eye-catching an image is, if it’s not properly displayed according to the platform you’re posting on, it will lose its appeal and won’t get you as many likes and shares as expected. You most surely don’t want to have a nice-looking picture on one channel and a completely distorted one on another channel. It’s just bad for business.
Furthermore, by posting a correctly sized image, you demonstrate that you have the necessary expertise and knowledge, that you’ve developed a real strategy with your audience in mind and that you do care about your online presence. This can only benefit your business.
Which Are the Social Media Photo Sizes
It’s important to know that each network has its own size requirements. Of course, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the rest of the platforms have constantly changed the image sizes and formats over the years. Below you can find a list of the current image size limits for some of the most popular social networks you can leverage:
Facebook Photo Sizes
- Business Page Profile Picture: 180 x 180
- Cover Photo: 820 x 312
- Shared Image: 1,200 x 630
- Shared Link: 1,200 x 628
- Event Image: 1920 x 1080 (Recommended)
- Facebook Ad: 1,200 x 628 (Recommended)
- Facebook Story: 1080 x 1920 (Recommended)
Instagram Photo Sizes
- Profile Picture: 110 x 110
- Photo Thumbnails: 161 x 161
- Instagram Post: 1080 x 1080
- Instagram Stories: 1080 x 1920
Twitter Photo Sizes
- Profile Photo: 400 x 400
- Header Photo: 1,500 x 500
- Twitter Post: 1024 x 512
Pinterest Photo Sizes
- Profile Picture: 165 x 165
- Board Cover Photo: 222 x 150
- Standard Pin: 1000 x 1500 (2:3 ratio)
LinkedIn Photo Sizes
- Personal Profile Image: 400 x 400 (Recommended)
- Personal Background Image: 1584 x 396
- Shared Image or Link: 1104 x 736 (Recommended)
- Company Logo: 300 x 300
- Square Logo: 60 x 60
- Company Cover Image: 1536 x 768 (Recommended)
- Banner Image for Company Pages: 646 x 220 (Minimum)
- LinkedIn Sponsored Ad: 1200 x 627
How to Resize your Photos Effectively
Today it’s quite simple to reduce the size of your photos for social media use. Of course, you could resort to a complex software like Photoshop, but the truth of the matter is that you don’t really need it. Photoshop is indeed the most powerful tool among image editors, but at the same time it’s got a steep learning curve and it’s not the most budget-friendly alternative, to say the least.
Instead, you can opt for a tool that is quite easy to use and gets the job done in no time, like our own BatchPhoto. BatchPhoto is a photo editor for both PC and Mac with batch processing capabilities, which means you can resize dozens or hundreds of images simultaneously. And the good news is that you can accomplish your task in a truly simple manner. All you have to do is follow three simple steps:
Step 1
Open the program and add the images you wish to resize. You can do this by clicking on the Add Photos button, by adding an entire folder or by just using drag & drop.
Step 2
Go to the Edit Photos tab and then click on Add Filter > Transform > Resize. Next, in order to reduce the size of your images, simply enter the desired values for the width and/or height and hit the OK button.
Step 3
In the Setup tab, you have the option of selecting the folder where you want to save your newly-resized images, as well as the preferred image format. BatchPhoto can read and export to more than 170 formats, including the popular JPG, TIF and PNG. Once you’ve made the final selections, just click on the Process tab and the program will automatically apply your edits to all the added photos.
In addition to resizing and converting, BatchPhoto can help you to further optimize and enhance your pictures for social media. In that sense you can rotate, crop, add the date and time or insert a logo or text watermark into your images. You can also adjust the contrast, brightness, color levels or saturation, reduce the noise or sharpen photos, as well as apply special effects like black and white, sepia or charcoal.
Bottom Line
Adding appealing visual content to your social media strategy is a great way to stand out from your competitors and to capture the attention of your audience. Adding properly sized visuals can be even more rewarding. The fact that you took the time to resize your pics demonstrates that you’re genuinely concerned about your audience’s experience and enables your company to create a positive professional reputation.
