Social media feeds more often than not, are flooded with content where each post may only receive a fraction of a second of a viewer’s focus at a time. Because of the incredible competition a single post will have on a social feed, it is important to make your posted images and videos stand out as much as possible, and a great way of doing this is to maximize the amount of screen real estate your post takes up.
Here is a little insight into the post sizes that you can use on different social media platforms:
Images/Videos
Instagram allows a fair bit of flexibility for post sizes when it comes to images and videos. The default size is a square image of 1080px by 1080px, with the widest image option available being 1080px by 556px and the tallest being 1080px by 1350px. These options provide 1.91:1 and 4:5 aspect ratios respectively.
Because it’s in your best interest to maximize screen real estate on the Instagram feed, it makes sense to use the 4:5 aspect ratio so that it easily grabs viewers’ attention. This can put videographers in a tricky position as, if a video is filmed in a landscape view, the ideal horizontal recording ratio of 16:9 will minimize the area that the video post obtains in the Instagram feed. The poster will then need to decide if they wish to keep the natural feel of the video by posting it in the landscape 16:9 view, or to crop the image to 1:1 or 4:5 in order to maximize the potential engagement on the video post.
Instagram also makes use of an infamous amount of compression on images and videos that are larger than the sizes highlighted above resulting in a loss of quality in the images and videos.
Something to take note of with Instagram image posts is that if you choose to share a carousel, you will need all the images to be the same aspect ratio, meaning that if you select the first image with a 1:1 aspect ratio, you will need to follow that for all the images.

Stories/Reels/IGTV
Instagram Stories, Reels and IGTV posts all follow a 9:16 aspect ratio or 1080px by 1920px resolution.
Instagram Stories allow you to add images that are smaller or larger than the recommended size with the option of being cropped or resized to fit the posting requirements, and both Reels and IGTV posts will need to have their thumbnail sizes considered.
Reel and IGTV posts will appear in your feed at an aspect ratio of 4:5 and will appear in your account grid with an aspect ratio of 1:1 so keep in mind how this will crop the thumbnail of the videos.

Much like Instagram, Facebook allows you to choose between sharing landscape, square, or portrait images and videos. Let’s take a look at what sizing you need for each:
Images
Facebook follows a lot of what Instagram does with their images as square aspect ratios have the same sizing requirements of 1080px by 1080px, vertical images with an aspect ratio of 4:5 have sizing requirements of 1080px by 1350px, and horizontal images of 1.91:1 require a size of 1200px by 628px.
Images that are either smaller or larger than the size requirements outlined above will either be compressed or upscaled which can result in reduced image quality of the posts.
Another important note to mention is that any post that has a link attached to it is recommended to be posted in the horizontal sizing requirements to avoid any unwanted cropping on the image.

Videos
Videos are where Facebook starts to differ in that it is recommended that the 16:9 or 9:16 aspect ratio is kept instead of the 1:1 or 4:5 aspect ratios. Therefore for horizontal videos, Facebook recommends a 1280px by 720px resolution and for vertical videos, a 720px by 1280px resolution.
With this in mind, in order to maximize screen real estate, it would be worthwhile to use the 720px by 1280px resolution, however the type of content and video purpose would determine if this aspect ratio is possible.
Stories
Facebook Stories use the same sizing requirements as Instagram Stories in that they use a 9:16 aspect ratio with a resolution of 1080px by 1920px.

This platform takes a much more simplistic approach to sharing media content. Twitter limits users to posting either photos or videos rather than photos, videos, stories, IGTV, Reels etc. This allows the user to understand how to easily optimize their media post without needing to research tonnes of information to see exactly what is required from them. Hopefully this blog will help with that too!
Single Photo/Video
Twitter has long preached that the ideal image size for its platform is the 16:9 image with a resolution of 1200px by 675px. However an update released in early 2021 has changed the way that users are able to post images as both 4K images and vertical posts without crop are now supported.
The new vertical image or video aspect ratio is 3:4 with a resolution of 1920px by 2560px and the new horizontal aspect ratio is 2:1 with a resolution of 2560px by 1280px.
This new 4K update from Twitter has greatly improved the range in size of images and videos that can be posted without compression. It is also important to note that while the aspect ratios outlined here are maximums according to their orientation, the aspect ratio of a photo or video is dynamic on Twitter meaning that you are not limited to specific aspect ratios.
Multiple Images
Where things become interesting in Twitter is when multiple images are used in the same post. While you can post multiple images using the same sizing requirements outlined above, the size that they are displayed in the thumbnail in the feed will differ.
This graphic from Kapwing explains it perfectly:

As you can see, the aspect ratio for each image in the thumbnail changes depending on the number of images shared in a post. As we already know, single images can range from aspect ratios of 2:1 to 3:4, however the aspect ratios of multiple image posts can range from 8:9 to 16:9.
Photo
Post image sizes recommended by LinkedIn include aspect ratios between 3:1 to 2:3 with a resolution at least 552px by 276px. On LinkedIn they also recommend doubling the size of an image before it is posted in order to maximize the image quality of the post, meaning that the maximum sizes that images should be posted on this platform are 1656px by 552px for horizontal images and 1104px by 1656px for portrait images.
Video
LinkedIn video post sizes are pretty simple as the minimum size is 256px by 144px with the maximum being 4096px by 2304px. Even though LinkedIn supports aspect ratios of 16:9 and 9:16, it is important to take note that these will still be posted as square images with black bars on either the top and bottom or on either side of the image. With this in mind, it is recommended to post an image of a maximum size of 2304px by 2304px in order to upload a high-quality square image that does not detract from the viewing experience.

Links
Similarly to Facebook, if an image is posted with a link on LinkedIn, you should adjust the size of the image to account for a certain crop with the post. Posts with links on LinkedIn should be posted with a maximum image size of 1200px by 627px at an aspect ratio of 1.9:1.

Social Media Savvy
Due to the constant updates that each social media platform receives, these recommended image sizes are subject to change, however it is possible to make sure that you are optimizing your social media posts to their fullest potential with the guidelines outlined above.
Find out more about Social Media Marketing in our Oviond blog.