David Ogilvy, the father of advertising, was famous for spending an inordinate amount of time on headlines.
Back then, social media didn’t exist. If it did, Ogilvy would probably give equal time to creating the perfect complementary image.
The Buffer.com blog has some great tips for creating social media graphics. The article is meant for non-designers, but if you’re new to social media marketing, it’s worth the read.
You may recall that I’ve written about Advise in the past, but they’ve changed their name and domain to adJelly.
If you missed my previous write-up about them, adJelly offers a fantastic collection of specs for all the most popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and more. You simply select the social media site you’re creating ads, images or graphics for in the left column and you’re presented with all the specs you’ll need.
The site is particularly useful for designers because sites like Facebook offer numerous options for sizes. For instance, Facebook offers sizes for single image ads, carousel ads, video ads, video slideshow ads, cover and profile images, post images, event images and more. Plus, specs change frequently, and some sites don’t make it easy to find the specs (I’m looking at you, Facebook!).
You can also download PSD and Sketch Packs to use in building your graphics.
EpicPxls has a great set of Social Media icons in vector format, free to download here.
If part of your design job is providing your company/client with images for social media use, you know how tedious it can be to keep up with what image sizes to use for what purpose on which site.
Thankfully, we have Advise.
Advise provides social media ad and image specs for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other popular social sites.
Who would have thought sharing an image on social media could be so complicated. After all the particulars, it appears that it boils down to using 1024×512 for horizontal images, and 800×1200 for vertical images.
It surely helps to scale and crop your images to the perfect size for each social network, but the bottom line is that if you share compelling images (or pictures of Kim Kardashian’s ass), people will click and open the full size image anyway.
I can’t disagree with anything Alex Goldfayn states in his 5 Reasons Social Media Is Runining Marketing article.
Simple is always better. Simple-to-use always beats feature-rich-but-complicated. If you believe that, then you know why Facebook is beating the digital pants off Google+ in the social media arena.
Facebook is a fairly simple service:
There’s very little thinking or learning-curve involved with using Facebook. Finding new friends is dead simple using Facebook, as is finding brands you wish to follow, and sharing photos and video. There is very little in the way of techy lingo used on the site, and outside of the privacy controls, the entire site is easy for even the most non-geek user to navigate and use. Now let’s look at Google+. (more…)
This social media icon set was created in Illustrator CS5 and contains 25 scalable vectors complete with semi-transparent shadows for use on various types of backgrounds. The download contains a .zip file with the original .ai file and an .eps version as well. Icons are available for use in personal and commercial projects. (more…)