by Marelise da Silva | Oct 24, 2020 | Digital Media Marketing, Social Media Marketing
To be effective in digital marketing and social media marketing, you’ll want to use the correct image sizes when posting to these platforms.
Here at WSI OMS, we’ve researched the optimal image sizes for all the major social media platforms. Follow this guide to get the most out of your social media marketing efforts.
The Social Media Platforms Covered In This Article
- Facebook
- Instagram
- LinkedIn
- Pinterest
- Snapchat
- Twitter
- YouTube
Facebook – The Social Media Marketing Behemoth
Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform with well over 2 billion active users in any given month. This number is fast approaching 3 billion. What’s important to remember is that these are the recommended image sizes. Anything smaller and Facebook will scale your images, making them look poor!
Facebook Cover Image
The recommended dimensions for the cover image is 820 x 312 pixels. Remember, if you’re using a logo, it’s always preferable to use Portable Network Graphic (PNG) images. While JPEG is fine for photos, their lossy compression is not suitable for flat graphics with steep transitions between colours.
PNG images give you the added benefit of transparent backgrounds – so keep that in mind.
Facebook Profile Image
The profile image will scale differently depending on the device from which you’re viewing.
This image must be at least 180 x 180 pixels and will render at 170 x 170 on your desktop, 128 x 128 on smartphones, and 36 x 36 on feature phones.
Facebook Event Cover Image
Event cover images are stock-standard 1980 x 1080 pixels in dimension. They will display as 470 x 174 in your feed.
Facebook Highlighted Image
Your upload size here should be 1200 x 717 pixels. It’s going to display at 843 x 504 pixels in your feed.
Facebook Shared Image
The recommended size for Facebook shared images is 1200 x 630 even though they will scale to a 1:1 aspect ratio. They will display at a max width of 470 pixels in your feed and 504 pixels on a page.
Facebook Shared Link Image
Similar (but not identical) in size to the shared image, you’ll want to aim for 1200 x 628 pixels when uploading. Not coincidentally, this is the recommended featured image size for WordPress blog posts.
The shared link image minimum for square images in feed is 154 x 154 pixels and 116 x 116 for your page.
Rectangular images have minimum display sizes of 470 x 246 in feed and 484 x 252 on a page.
Instagram
Visual and effective at communicating your brand, Instagram is a great digital marketing medium for connecting with your followers.
Instagram Stories Image
Upload a minimum resolution image of 600 x 1067 pixels. It’s advisable, however, to use 1080 x 1920 pixel images instead.
All Other Instagram Images
- Instagram portrait image: 1080 x 1350 pixels.
- Instagram square image: 1080 x 1080 pixels.
- Instagram landscape image: 1080 x 566 pixels.
- Instagram profile image: 110 x 100 pixels.
- Instagram thumbnail image: 161 x 161 pixels.
LinkedIn – Digital Marketing Targetted at Professionals
Social media marketing via LinkedIn can be a rewarding exercise. Due to the professional nature of the platform, conversion rates are often higher than on other social platforms. At 6.1% for ads, there’s no reason to believe standard digital marketing results are not equally impressive.
Additionally, LinkedIn accounts for 80% of B2B leads.
Because of this, you must place high-quality images when using this medium.
LinkedIn Profile Background Images
Often noticed even before the profile picture, LinkedIn background images should be 1548 x 396 pixels and no larger than 8MB in size.
LinkedIn Article Cover Images
Writing LinkedIn articles can seriously boost your influence in your niche. The ideal size for article covers is 2000 x 600 pixels. Images added to the article itself have the same limitations.
LinkedIn Profile Photo Images
Profile photos should be between 400 x 400 and 7680 x 4320 pixels and are limited to 8MB. LinkedIn profile photos should be headshots.
- LinkedIn company logo images: 300 x 300 pixels.
- LinkedIn company cover images: 1744 x 444 pixels.
- LinkedIn shared images and link posts: 1104 x 736 pixels.
Pinterest
Pinterest is a source of inspiration for many. Every Pin is an image that can also link back to websites, making Pinterest a great traffic source.
Pinterest Board Display Images
The board display images are thumbnails posted to a Pinterest board. A minimum of 55 x 55 for small images. Large board posts should be 222 x 150 pixels.
- Pinterest profile photo images: At least 165 x 165 pixels.
- Pin images: A fixed width of 236 pixels, although the height is variable, depending on where the image is displayed.
Snapchat
Snapchat has 200 million+ users which you can direct to your site by placing a link at the bottom of your story.
Both the Snapchat “Geofilter” image as well as the Snapchat image ads should be 1080 x 1920 pixels.
Twitter
From tweeting during peak hours to @mentions, to harness Twitter’s full potential, you’ll have to get the image sizes right. It’s a worthwhile effort since Twitter boasts over 330 million users.
Twitter Header Photo
The recommended image size is 1500 x 500 pixels for the header photo.
Twitter Profile Image
Similar to LinkedIn, your profile picture will be cropped and displayed as a circular image. It will display at 200 x 200 pixels, but the recommended upload size is 400 x 400 pixels.
Twitter Instream Photo
The recommended aspect ratio is 16:9. Take this into consideration since the minimum image dimensions are 600 x 375, but larger images will look better when users click on the image.
YouTube – The World’s Second Largest Search Engine
Yep, you read that right. The guys over at Alphabet must be doing something right to own positions one and two in this space.
The video giant processes more than 3 billion searches a month!
You ought to seriously consider harnessing the power of this beast in your social media marketing campaign if you’re not doing so already.
YouTube Channel Profile Photo
While YouTube will only display at 98 x 98, you should upload an image of size 800 x 800 pixels for your channel profile photo.
YouTube Channel Cover Photo
Also known as channel art, the upload size is a recommended 2560 x 1140 pixels with a max file size of 4MB.
YouTube Video Thumbnail
The minimum width for the YouTube video thumbnail is 640 pixels. The recommended image size is 1280 x 720 pixels with a max file size of 2MB.
Conclusion
While none of the above is strict guidelines, remember, if you can’t match the dimensions exactly, it’s safer to go with larger images rather than smaller.
For more social media marketing material, see the rest of our blog.
by Marelise da Silva | Oct 24, 2020 | LinkedIn, Social Media Marketing
How do you get your social media marketing to work for you on LinkedIn in 2020? Times are uncertain across the world at the moment and LinkedIn has recently published a guide on how to reassess your business’s digital marketing strategy in the midst of Covid-19. The greatest concern marketers are facing at the moment, has been found to be budget cuts. So, let’s look at an optimised inbound marketing strategy that will decrease your spend and allow you to take advantage of connecting with the estimated 700 million users on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn social media marketing strategy in 2020
- Post visually appealing content
As with any marketing strategy, rich content is a distinguishing factor. But good visuals become great visuals when there is useful and engaging information attached to it. (Also, LinkedIn says that visual content can increase comments by up to 98%).
Ensure your LinkedIn has all of your details and that it reflects your brand story. Impress people who are visiting your page.
- Don’t disregard the LinkedIn “search” feature
Apply filters in the advanced search section to find specific influential people or companies to target in your marketing
- Engage in LinkedIn Groups
This is an opportunity to interact with others in your sector and to get onto the radar of your target audience. Think about what other professionals might be interested in reading or hearing from you, and post relevant content. Be sure to participate in discussions and to be interactive.
Just as with other social media platforms, LinkedIn also has suggested times for peak performance of your posts.
If social media marketing budget cuts are not a concern
Look at sponsored content, sponsored InMail, or Text Ads. Sponsored content could be a good way to capitalise on content that is already performing well. The sponsored InMail option delivers your ad directly to your targeted audience’s inbox, resembling a message. Text Ads are more traditional, appearing to the side of a user’s news feed.
Lastly, if you have a company page and you’re one of the admins, remember to take advantage of LinkedIn Analytics. Here you can assess your page performance and keep track of post metrics to see what content is resonating with your audience.
Need help with your social media marketing strategy? WSI OMS is the perfect digital marketing agency for you! For more information, contact us today.
by Marianna Muscat | Oct 17, 2020 | Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the most popular way to reach potential clients since everyone has a smartphone in their hands. What do you do when your target audience isn’t on social media, though?
Although social media is at the forefront of marketing, there are other ways to reach your target audience without social media marketing. Here are some useful tips that will help you connect to potential clients:
Keep your social media accounts active
Even if your target audience isn’t on social media, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should abandon your social media platforms altogether. Once somebody has heard of you, they will usually check out your company’s social media platforms to make sure that your company is legit. Hold their interest and establish your company as an authoritative figure by constantly sharing relevant content that lets them know you are passionate and knowledgeable about your field.
Standout by establishing yourself as an industry expert
Establishing yourself as an expert in your field will allow for more potential customers to come across your brand when doing their research. To do this, you need to create helpful resources for your target audience to use. A great example would be a blog that discusses the core issues and questions people may have when using your product or service. HappyFox is a useful example of the above.
Start a podcast
Podcasts are a great way to share knowledge and connect with your audience. With millions of people tuning in weekly to listen to podcasts, you are sure to tap into your target market at some point. Providing a podcast that is both informative and entertaining will ensure that listeners keep coming back for more, as it’s both helpful and a great way to keep people entertained on their way to work, or even at work. Check out the Marketing Speak podcast as a good reference in terms of how you can approach it.
Conduct research and compile white papers
By conducting original research on your industry and putting together an in-depth report on a key topic, you will easily manage to connect with and inform your target audience. Giving people useful statistics and data will help you establish your brand as an industry leader and you will, in turn, be quoted by other key individuals and organisations. You can also provide the information via a white paper, which highlights the problem and gives solutions.
Contact WSI OMS for help with social media marketing
By trying out the above-mentioned methods as a way of connecting with your target audience, you will be able to easily connect with them in a user-friendly way, without having to break the bank either on fancy marketing tools.
Looking for some extra help with your social media marketing? Contact WSI OMS today!
by Marelise da Silva | Oct 13, 2020 | Social Media Marketing
As part of your social media marketing strategy, you should include paid social media, dark social media, and influencer marketing. Here’s why:
Paid Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has progressed to a point where sharing the odd post – no matter how well-crafted – with your followers and expecting them to do the rest is no longer effective.
To target your ideal customer, nurture their buyer journey, and ultimately get them to purchase from your website, you need to take advantage of the fact that all social networks now offer post promotion. Not only does paid social media put your message in front of far more users, not using this tool actually puts you on the back foot. According to a 2018 survey, 92% of small businesses are increasing their investment in social media.
Even though advertising on social media gives immediate visibility to your brand, don’t give in to the temptation to spend, spend, spend! From elementary user demographics to psychographics such as values and attitudes, interests and lifestyles, and personality, social media platforms have parameters to enhance your targeting.
But first, you need to determine whether Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Instagram is the best fit for your ideal client. It’s all about utilizing the appropriate platform to target the right audience with engaging content.
Facebook is by far the biggest of all the social networks with 2.41 billion monthly active users. An average Facebook user clicks on 11 ads per month. Their advertising costs vary depending on many factors like your industry, location, and objectives, but the average price for an advert decreased 4% in Q2 2019. Facebook is therefore a good place to start.
Dark Social Traffic
Not to be confused with marketing on the dark web, dark social media refers to the sharing of your content without your knowledge. Although you cannot track the impact of dark social media with your regular analytics, more than 80% of sharing from marketing websites happens “invisibly”.
If you think of it as a digital word of mouth, it makes sense that this is even more powerful amid COVID-19 social distancing, working from home, and digital communities.
So how do you get in on this action? Make sure that you include buttons on all your output that encourages sharing through email, text message, or direct social messaging. Moreover, include a strong call to action to go to a landing page, read another post, or sign up to your email list.
Having a prominent, respected trendsetter in your niche share your content in this intimate way will drive mass traffic. That’s where the next category comes in.
Influencer Marketing
As consumers are bombarded with ever more marketing messages, so they tend to filter out an increasing amount. One way to catch the attention of prospects is to leverage the power of humans in your digital marketing.
Marketing guru Seth Godin notes that “People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories, and magic.”
From published authors in serious fields to mainstream celebrities for younger audiences, influencer marketing uses the trust they have established with their large following to punt your product by supporting or endorsing your brand or co-creating content.
This is not an overnight strategy, as you need to build a relationship with influencers in your niche. Engage with them to the point where they value your expertise and enjoy your content. Slow and steady is the name of this game, but the results are well worth the wait.
If you are looking for a world-class social media marketing agency to keep you current and competitive, then contact WSI OMS today.
by Marelise da Silva | Sep 29, 2020 | Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the most popular way to reach potential clients, since everyone has a smartphone in their hands nowadays. What do you do when your target audience isn’t on social media, though?
Although social media is at the forefront of marketing, there are other ways to reach your target audience without social media marketing. Here are some useful tips that’ll help you connect to potential clients:
Keep your social media accounts active
Even if your target audience isn’t on social media, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should abandon your social media platforms altogether. In fact, once somebody has heard of you, they will usually check out your company’s social media platforms to make sure that your company is legit. Hold their interest and establish your company as an authoritative figure by constantly sharing relevant content that lets them know you’re passionate and knowledgeable about your field.
Standout by establishing yourself as an industry expert
Establishing yourself as an expert in your field will allow for more potential customers to come across your brand when doing their research. To do this, you need to create helpful resources for your target audience to use. A great example would be a blog that discusses the core issues and questions people may have when using your product or service. HappyFox is a useful example of the above.
Start a podcast
Podcasts are a great way to share knowledge and connect with your audience. With millions of people tuning in weekly to listen to podcasts, you’re sure to tap into your target market at some point. Providing a podcast that is both informative and entertaining will ensure that listeners keep coming back for more, as it’s both helpful and a great way to keep people entertained on their way to work, or even at work. Check out the Marketing Speak podcast as a good reference in terms of how you can approach it.
Conduct research and compile white papers
By conducting original research on your industry and putting together an in-depth report on a key topic, you’ll easily manage to connect with and inform your target audience. Giving people useful statistics and data will help you establish your brand as an industry leader and you’ll, in turn, be quoted by other key individuals and organisations. You can also provide the information via a white paper, which highlights the problem and gives solutions.
Contact WSI OMS for help with social media marketing
By trying out the above mentioned methods as a way of connecting with your target audience, you’ll be able to easily connect with them in a user-friendly way, without having to break the bank either on fancy marketing tools.
Looking for some extra help with your social media marketing? Contact WSI OMS today!
by Marianna Muscat | Sep 18, 2020 | LinkedIn, Social Media Marketing
In a previous post, we unpacked LinkedIn’s helpful guide for the marketing industry. In this second part, we’re delving deeper into the strategies, activities and information that has been proposed for business owners who want to grow and see a return on the investment they are spending on marketing during COVID-19.
LinkedIn’s key steps to showing the impact of your marketing activities: Part 2
1. Make measurement easier
Getting an accurate look at the ROI of your marketing spend is vital to understand where you are wasting money that could be better spent elsewhere. With economies declining worldwide, it is more important than ever to know what you’re getting for your investment to ensure growth even in the toughest times.
LinkedIn understands that this is a crucial aspect of business ownership, and has made it even easier to measure and prove your ROI when spending your marketing budget on the platform. In this endeavour, LinkedIn has partnered with various providers such as Google, Moat and Acxiom to help you optimise your LinkedIn measurement strategy. The aim of this is to give you confidence in using the platform and proving outcomes based on brand, business and performance.
Whether you aim to educate your audience, generate more leads, or create awareness for your brand, LinkedIn’s performance is being showcased through a variety of partnerships, whether native or 3rd-party. When using these accurate measurements to make business decisions, you’ll have better information at your disposal to increase your decision-making abilities and drive your business into the post-COVID-19 era.
2. Implementing best practice
This section provides a valuable, easy to follow list of tips to help you measure the impact of your investment in ad campaigns on LinkedIn. It takes you through various stages from launch to A/B testing and provides links to helpful resources for each of the steps in the best practice section.
Let’s take a look at the tips:
- Be clear on your marketing goal and use it to identify your key metrics before you launch a campaign.
- Use the insight tag in LinkedIn to understand which actions your ads are driving (including sign-ups, downloads and sales).
- Create Lead Gen forms to accurately track the metrics at the end of the funnel (such as cost per lead) to ensure that you’re spending your budget on value-creating activities.
- Study your campaign results. The recommendation is to review your results after 7 days, but it’s always worthwhile to check in on your results as your campaign ages to determine performance over different periods.
- Take note of the audience demographics from your campaigns. This will help you to target audiences more accurately in future and customise your messaging to suit the audiences who respond best to your campaigns.
- Improve your bids to get the best for your budget by studying your performance insights. The campaign manager should become your virtual “war room” so you can adapt and improve your messaging across the various aspects of your campaigns.
- Test your messaging with A/B testing, so you understand how to better link messaging with audiences for improved results.
3. Goal alignment with LinkedIn
In the previous post, we mentioned different scenarios that you might be facing in terms of your marketing budget (eliminated, reduced or maintained). This section of the LinkedIn guide provides you with a low-down on how LinkedIn can help you reach your goals, the accountability process behind these activities, and the tools that will be implemented in the process whether your budget is more, less or the same as pre-COVID.
From understanding insights from the market and applying strategies used in recession economies, LinkedIn can help you to use organic methods and free tools on the platform to reach your goals if your budget has shrunk to zero. Suppose your budgets have reduced, but you still have some funds to apply. In that case, LinkedIn can help you to understand where your potential customers are consuming content, and how to match up with your ideal audience to improve performance with a mixture of free and paid tools on the platform.
For the business owners who have maintained their marketing budgets, LinkedIn provides an array of organic and paid strategies to reach a larger target market, generate leads, drive sales and awareness and build authentic brand messaging. This level of spend on LinkedIn gives you (as business owner) more options and also gives you access to weekly check-ins to determine your progress across the tools on the platform.
The fantastic news about goal alignment with LinkedIn is that there are many options for every budget, so no business owner is prohibited from participating on the platform.
If you’re ready to focus on your digital strategy and improve your ROI on marketing activities, download the eBook now.
If you want to revitalise your marketing, digital marketing strategy, or LinkedIn content, contact WSI OMS for assistance during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
