We’ve long been interested in the impact of social media images for engagement, retweets, clicks, and more. We found that tweets with images receive 150 percent more retweets than those without.

One of the big questions for me is how you get an engaging image to look its best when it’s in a stream, timeline, or News Feed?

What’s the best—and maybe even the easiest—way to go about it?

In general, here are the best sizes for sharing images on social media. (Click on any link here to jump to the details for a specific network.)

Facebook – 1,200 x 628

Twitter – 1,024 x 512

LinkedIn – 800 x 800

Google+ – 800 x 1,200

Pinterest – 735 x 1,102

Instagram – 1,200 x 1,200

 

Our two favorite image size templates that cover most networks

In experimenting with the fastest, easiest way to create images we know will work well in social media feeds, we came across a couple of image sizes that became our go-tos: one size for horizontal (landscape) images and one for vertical (portrait) images.

  • Horizontal (landscape) – 1,024 x 512
  • Vertical (portrait) – 800 x 1,200

If you want to hear what I have to say in 140 characters or less, please follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/erikpenn.