If you’ve spent any time reading my blog or attending any of my classes, you know how important your presence on social media has become.
One of the first questions, talent executives at the studio level ask about an artist’s qualifications these days is “how’s his social media following?”
Whether it’s Twitter or Instagram, Facebook or YouTube, a social media following is super important. It’s no longer that thing the kids are using, it’s that thing that the Neilson’s are actually using to calculate the popularity of a show.
A social media following can make or break whether or not you get a job on a TV show.
But that’s not the only way to look at it.
It actually gives enormous control over to the artist. If the artist busts her ass to create a massive social media presence, then the artist can start to write her own ticket to notoriety.
If you’ve been involved in social media at all you should know that a post with an image gets as much as 120 percent more engagement than average posts. So, if you’re not using images in your social media, you’re probably cheating yourself out of engagement.
But when you use images, the images sizes differ for each platform. If you don’t use the correct size on the correct platform, then heads are cut off and your images look weird and unprofessional. I’ve made those mistakes several times and I feel foolish and amateurish.
Once I saw a graphic that showed all the proper social media image sizes for each different platform, I saved it, downloaded it and tacked in on to my wall in front of my computer. Since then I haven’t made any mistakes–well, I’ve still made a ton of mistakes, just not as many.
That chart helped me a lot so I thought I’d put one together myself for the 2017 requirements and share it with you…
You can look at it on this blog or you can download it at a full 600px x 1866px in a PDF right here.
Just right-click (cmd+click) for Mac and choose ‘save image as’ and save it to your hard drive. It’s a full sized cheat sheet you can post on your wall.
Now there shouldn’t be any more obstacles to you setting up your YouTube Channel with custom thumbnails for your videos or uploading the right sized photo for your Facebook cover or tweeting a photo that doesn’t chop off your head.
Just as a side note when posting on Twitter. Always leave padding (space between the edge of the content and the image border). It may look great on your initial post, but when it’s time to retweet and image, often it will chop off your head on someone else’s feed.
Also, it’s always good to check for updates on the image size requirements for social media as they always seem to be changing.
I hope this image size cheat sheet helps you to be more efficient in posting to your social media accounts.
If anyone has any other advice they’d like to share please feel free to leave a comment below!
