AI: On Image for all Social Media

Post date: Mar 29, 2015 8:13:39 PM

Recently, Twitter’s data scientist Douglas Mason concluded that tweets containing photos from verified accounts resulted in a 35 percent increase in the number of retweets. Similar results are seen across the social landscape—photos make a huge difference. However, it’s important to make sure that the images are sized appropriately for social networks.

But the fact that each social network seems to have its own suggested image size creates a lot of difficulties for the hobbyist blogger as well as for the large corporation. For example, here are the different size requirements for the properties that I most often post on behalf of Rackspace:

Twitter has a 2:1 ratio and suggests a 1024 x 512-pixel image

Additionally, the 2:1 ratio for Twitter is not quite accurate on their iOS mobile app; I’ve discovered that images are cropped significantly on the left and right borders and displayed on the iOS mobile app at a 1.75:1 ratio

Facebook suggests a 1200 x 630-pixel image

Google+ seems to post images at 345 x 195 pixels

LinkedIn posts a thumbnail-sized image at 180 x 110 pixels

Creating unique images for each different outlet causes a strain on resources.

We are going to simplify the image creation process. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were one guideline, one image to rule them all? An image that could be created once but would look sharp on all of the social networks we post to?

When we use our ninth-grade knowledge of ratios (the whole cross-multiply and divide thing) as we set forth to determine this standard image size. One thing that worked in our favor is that each of these social networks prefers a landscape image—since Rackspace is not currently active on Instagram (square) or Pinterest (portrait), our job was considerably easier.

After crunching the numbers, we discover that the following image size: 1600 pixels wide by 800 pixels high with a 160-pixel padding on the left and right margins will work for almost all social media profile images.

Create a profile image.