social networks

Top social networks: Guide to images for company pages

May 13, 2013 By Dan Thornton

Are you setting up social network profiles for your business? Or maintaining social media which already exists? Either way, it’s important to make sure your pages and profiles look their best.

If you’re updating your company logos, re-branding, or simply want to change images to give your page a refresh, then it’s important to ensure you know the right image dimensions, file sizes and positioning for each social network. So we’ve compiled the requirements in once place.

When looking at logo designs, always keep in mind that social media generally requires versions which will work in a rectangular landscape format (Cover images), and also a version which will work as a smaller, square image (Profile images).

Facebook Pages Images:

There are two images to maintain for a Facebook page.

Cover Photo: This should be 851 pixels wide x 315 tall. Smaller images must be at least 399 pixels wide and will be stretched to this larger size. Smaller file sizes will help quicker load times, and Facebook recommended a .jpg which is less than 100kb in size.
They must include no more than 20% text.
Profile Picture: This should be at least 180 x 180 pixels square, which will then be displayed at 160 x 160 pixels. Leave space around your image or text to allow for cropping of the image.

Cover photo guidelines state that you should use a unique image to represent your page which can’t be ‘deceptive, misleading, infringe on anyone else’s copyright or be in violation of the Page Terms. You may not encourage people to upload your cover photo to their personal timelines.’

You should also account for your profile image being displayed on top of your cover photo, which is a 160×160 square starting 23 pixels from the left edge.

Twitter Profile Images:

A Twitter page requires three images to be complete. Photo and Header Images are located under Account settings. Background images are changed under the Design setting.

Photo Image: The photo image appears throughout Twitter. It’s a 73 x 73 pixel square, with larger files able to be uploaded. File size can be up to 2MB in JPG, GIF or PNG formats.
Header Image: This appears behind your profile information on your Twitter page. It’s recommended to be 1252 wide x 626 high, and with a maximum file size of 5MB.
Background Image: The background image can be up to 2MB in size, with no fixed dimensions as you can choose to Tile your image if desired, although we wouldn’t recommend it! In general, a 1600×1200 .JPG image will be the right dimensions for your Twitter background.

When designing a Background Image, remember that the navigation menus on a Twitter profile will take up significant space beside the Twitter feed. Limit graphics to under 200 pixels from the left-hand edge to ensure they can be seen clearly.

Google+ Page Images:

Two images are needed for the Google+ page for your company:

Profile Picture: These have recently been changed to display as a circular profile image, meaning that your 250 x 250 square dimensions now need to account for circular cropping with plenty of space around the focal point of your image.
Cover Photo: Cover photos are now displayed in a 16:9 ratio, with a size of 2120 wide x 1192 high to display properly.

Youtube Channel image sizes:

As another Google property, the new ‘One Channel’ designs for Youtube are similar in some ways to Google+. Again, there are two images required:

Profile Picture: Currently still a square image, so we use a 240 x 240 square which then displays at smaller sizes.
Channel Art: A single 2560 x 1440 pixel image which can be optimised to display properly on different devices with a safe 1546×423 central area which works across platforms, a wide area for tablets, larger desktop displays, and the full image on TVs. A template is available to download from Youtube’s help page.

Notice that on your page, the Profile Picture will sit in the top left of your Channel Art.

LinkedIn Company Page Images:

LinkedIn requires 3 images for a company page.

Image: 2MB PNG, JPG or GIF, which must be 646×220 pixels or larger.
Standard Logo: Max 2MB PNG, JPG or GIF which will be re-sized to 100×60 pixels.
Square Logo: Max 2MB PNG, JPG or GIF which will be re-sized to 50×50 pixels.

Don’t forget to click Publish after adding your Image, or it won’t be saved.

Flickr Profile Image Requirements:

Photo sharing site Flickr has unveiled a new design effective from May 21, 2013, which now includes a Cover Photo on the profile page for every user.

The selection of photos for both Cover Photos and Avatars are both limited to either new uploads or Recent Photos.

Cover Photo: There’s no official size guidelines, but looking at how the page displays above, the Cover Photos is approximately 1349 pixels wide by 235 pixels high. The Flickr navigation menu stretches 45 pixels down across the top of the image, with the username, avatar image, and other information stretching up 120 pixels from the bottom.
Profile Photo: 300 x 300 pixels square

General profile tips:

There are numerous other social networks which we could have also included, ranging from Pinterest and Instagram to Reddit and Stumbleupon. Most simply require a square profile image, but let us know if you’d like to see any additions to our list above.

We’ll keep this page updated with the latest changes, so it might be worth bookmarking us, or following us on one of the above social networking sites to make sure you’re up with the latest designs.

Data, Sharing and Over-Sharing

July 2, 2012 By Dan Thornton

Data is one of the biggest trends at the moment – it’s interesting to see the amount of coverage given to the recently announced integration between Nike’s Fuelband and the Path social network, for example.

What’s interesting to me about this is that the Nike Fuelband is essentially a very cool fitness tracking bracelet, which continues the Nike+ tracking and sharing trend. If you’ve tracked your run etc 5 or more times, it’s extremely likely to now be a habit you’ll continue, and the more social you are, the more likely you’ll keep it going to pass that early barrier.

That’s one side to it, the other struck me as I was distracted by the stats on my Last.fm profile.

Will social networks be defined by how much is shared?

Obviously there have already been attempts to create new social networks around the selling point of user privacy, and so far none have really achieved the kind of meteoric success of the big social sites.

What I’m thinking about is something slightly different in the way the networks are perceived and gain users, and it struck me as I posted on Facebook about how I don’t automatically feed every Spotify track into Facebook, but they’re all available as scrobbled by Last.fm (In 5 years I’ve scrobbled 14,524 songs to Last.fm which if you took an average of 4 minutes per track would be 58096 minutes, 968.26 hours, or 40 days worth).

What I’m thinking of is something like the following split:

Least shared data: Twitter. No requirement for real names, or details. Big asynchronous groups.
Average: Facebook. Suggests using real data (although you can get around it). Slightly smaller groups and closer to ‘real’ friends.
Most shared data: Path. Integrate and share absolutely everything with a smaller, closer group of friends.

Will data sharing and data services start to shape our attraction to certain networks in an equal fashion to who we know is actually using them? Does the social aspect of sharing fitness data with other people in training equal the social aspect of connecting with my family whose interests on Facebook may rarely intersect with my own?

If we take Facebook as the standard sharing benchmark due to the massive user numbers, there’s definitely a skew towards much more sharing than ever before (Obviously some will have a locked down FB profile with a fair bit of effort required). Will we see a world of people addicted to data sharing looking to go beyond what FB can offer, or a greater number of people looking for more privacy and less automatic sharing?

These aren’t absolutes, and there will always be people heading in both directions, but I’m intrigued to see on which side the see-saw starts leaning.

Do you think many people will continue to silo the data in the most appropriate communities (e.g music on last.fm, books on Goodreads, fitness on a running forum etc), or will they look for one central data hub social network to rule them all?

Facebook’s Trending Articles – adding irrelevance into my network

April 26, 2012 By Dan Thornton

Facebook started testing ‘Trending Articles’ roughly a week ago, but they’ve appeared in my own account for the first time today. Now below the latest update from my network, I get a block displaying 5 articles read by someone connected to me, like so (name of friend removed as who knows whether they want it displayed publicly)

I have the vaguest idea that this might be about American Football – a sport I rarely watch as I’m not a big fan, and it’s not freely available in the UK. In fact, none of the 5 highlighted stories were particularly interesting or relevant.

Partly that’s because my Facebook network is a network of friends, family, present and former colleagues and other people I’ve met over the last few years. So many of the people on there may not share similar interests to me – I don’t keep in touch with my 2nd cousin because of her knowledge of SEO, Social Media or 3D Printing for example.

And partly it’s because there’s no way for me to indicate which stories might actually be interesting and allow Facebook to learn more about what to show me – it’s not being cross-referenced against my listed interests as far as I can see.

Not only that, but there’s no way to remove or minimise it from my stream, and it’s designed to blend it well enough I can see a mistaken click on the lone ‘Share’ button is likely to happen more than once.

How Google missed a trick:

And possibly the saddest part of this is that I used to have the perfect mechanisms for finding articles from people I knew which I always found interesting. In addition to Twitter, my favourite way to get stories from friends and contacts was via Google Reader – it meant that the people I followed had made a decision to publicly share something from their stream which led to a far higher signal to noise ratio as I was able to select people with relevant interests from within my network, see everything they’d shared quickly and easily, and remove anyone who wasn’t quite in sync with what I wanted.

Obviously Google dropped that to pursue Google+, but that network has emulated Facebook in providing a lot of noise around the things I actually want. And yet Google has 6+ years of data on what I actively click and share via Reader, what I search for, and what I list as my interests on my profiles.

The saddest thing is that as publishers are finally moving towards embracing digital more and more as their core medium, the social networks seem to be moving towards interruption as a way to force up their figures and revenue. And while everyone complains about spam and misdirection in search results, at least there is an incentive for Google and Bing to try to curb the tide of paid links and dodgy manipulation in SEO, whereas there’s no such recourse on each social network.

The user experience of sex…

November 16, 2011 By Dan Thornton

Really interesting video of Tor Myrhen, the President and Chieft Creative Officer of Grey New York using the tale of how he lost his virginity at age 14 to compare the user experience of the process between 1986 and 2011.

It’s a good reminder of how technology may change, but at their core people don’t, and how although the core desires and motivations remain identical, the ways in which we communicate and connect do lead to different interactions and outcomes. But where it goes further for me is in the repercussions of those changes and how they may have an effect on the way our core desires now manifest themselves

Desire in the connected age:

I’m not much younger than Myrhen, so most of the references are pretty familiar, particularly skateboarding. I actually have a VHS cassette that a friend put together of a group of us hanging out and attempting to skate from around 20 years ago, and I wonder whether I’d have let myself be filmed if I thought anyone outside of the five of us would ever see it? I’d still want to be an awesome skater, and I’d still suck, so would I dare go near a board if I thought it would end up on Facebook and Youtube in minutes?

Given the public nature of connections, would I have pursued the same girls, or had the same serendipitous moments of mutual interest? And would my friends have been using technology to screw them up more effectively than they managed in real life?

And when some of those teen romances inevitably ended, what implications does it have when it’s announced publicly on social networks, with an almost micro-celebrity level of PR regarding who was dumped, whose story gets out first, and who gets blamed?

As Myhren says, all of the data that got shared on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and indexed by Google, is essentially around for eternity, or at least as long as those companies are with us, so flashing forward 20 years in my own life, what effects does that have on me now? In my 30s in 1986 it would have taken a lot of effort to track down past friends and girlfriends if I was feeling nostalgic, compared to a quick search on Google and some social networks – I’m in regular contact with three of my best friends that I met living in the U.S despite being terrible at keeping in touch before the broadband revolution really took off in the UK, for example.

Out of curiousity, after seeing this, I did a quick check to see how many ex-girlfriends I could track down with barely any effort, and without revealing my personal quantitative data, I managed about 70% success in about an hour. Does that change what happens with regards to nostalgia and ‘ending’ relationships which can be so easily resumed? Does it mean that although the desire for a quick romance still exists for many people, the reality is that it’s always easy for one party to at least attempt to resume it online, whether or not that leads to problems?

After all, the rules and guidelines of society, whether legal, religious, or community generated have all come about to enable humans to combine their core desires with the need to live, work and exist together in a fairly mutually acceptable way. So given that those rules and guideliness are changing at a faster pace than ever due to the speed of technological change, are we going to cope with the new rules and guidelines, and what does that mean for our kids? We can talk about digital natives seeing the internet and mobile as natural parts of their lives, but our kids and grandkids will still have the same core desires that we’ve had for centuries. The difference will be how they reconcile them with the world around them, both digital and physical.

Everyone’s a curator now…

October 10, 2011 By Dan Thornton

We’ve talked for years about citizen journalism and self-publishing, but more important than the channels of distribution are the ways in which content and context are discoved via search engines and social recommendations, and the fact that theoretically this leads to any piece of content available online being indexable, findable and potentially popular.

But what’s interesting me at the moment is the rise in curation – not necessarily on a professional level (for example NPR’s Andy Carvin curating Middle East tweets to an audience of almost 60,000 followers, or the increased use of tools such as Ushahidi and Storify by journalists and news organisations), but the effect it has on ‘ad hoc’ content curation – note how I’m trying to avoid that increasingly ridiculous line between amateur/citizen and professional/establishment content production!

What I mean by ad hoc is that we’re all walking around with cameras or mobile phones, and many of us are then sharing via our various online networks – and that can range from family pictures and days out to long form writing and video. And I’m struck by the way in which my own experiences are changing, even at a family event.

How curation changes our lives:

I recently went down to the war museum at Duxford for the second time this year to celebrate a family event with my parents and my son. And as always, I was carrying my phone (a Nokia N900 for the record), and taking a mix of personal family pictures and ones which I intended to make public on my Flickr account and possibly elsewhere. All totally normal.

Consolidated B-24M Liberator Second World War American Bomber

Except here’s the change. The first time we visited I took a load of pictures of the amazing planes and tanks on display, and then made them public with most of them just called something like – ‘Plane at Duxford’. I’d uploaded probably 80 or so photos and didn’t really want to spend a whole Sunday cataloguing them. And the blog post it inspired was a thought about how the rise of communications technology etc seems to have sucked all the glamour and excitement from air travel.

This time I did something totally different.

Almost subsconsciously, every time I took a picture of a vehicle on display, I also snapped the information beside it about the model and historical information.

And I wasn’t doing this for myself. Occasionally I’ve snapped museum information if it’s something I want to investigate further later on, but although I quite like planes and military history, I don’t have the time or inclination to start reading up on it at the moment.

Instead, I realised I was automatically doing it becuase I knew at some point I’d have the time to make those images public, and I wanted to be able to hopefully provide the correct and relevant information for anyone seeing them, as well as potentially feeding my ego by making them more discoverable. I recently discovered that my Flickr account has had over 12,000 views, and although I know that those stats include all the times I’ve looked at my own snaps, that still leaves a lot of views from other people – some of whom have been kind enough to leave comments on the images I’ve made public (apparently 699 photos, with far less tagged and geo-located, according to the handy stats page).

Considering the huge number of other people at Duxford that day armed with cameras and mobile phones, I wonder how many other images were being captured, shared and then found online, and how many other people might start doing similar things to catalogue their own creations?

How much more content is being produced already which isn’t being curated and tagged, and therefore lies undiscovered? And how many more people will start creating collections of items which interest them, using tools which are easier and more accessible than a traditional blog? We’ve already seen that to some extent with the rise of simpler tools such as Tumblr, or the amount of video and photo content which is being shared on Facebook every day, along with the immense volume of videos on Youtube. And there seems to have been an increase in tools and services which attempt to help curation, whether it’s the more established universal shopping and fashion industries, or newer ideas. But none of them have got mass traction yet – if one does, how will that change things. Is there a way, for example, for a service to help me not only collect and curate everything I might have uploaded to Facebook, but to easily let me share it outside of that particular walled garden?

It’s one reason why I use Flickr, and pay for a Pro account, along with increasingly looking at using the likes of Audioboo and Soundcloud for audio. Obviously Youtube and others such as Vimeo have video covered, and my blogs and websites do the job for text. But at some point someone will crack the way of making all of these points easy to distribute to, and more importantly, collate and curate from? (You can already do easy sharing to a number of those sites even via older phones and services – for Flickr and Youtube etc I tend to use the built-in service on the Nokia, but I know several others exist for publishing – just not for pulling it all back together). I could hack everything together myself to make a coherent lifestream, but I’ve never found enough reason to take the time, and I suspect most other people feel the same ( I do find the time if clients agree to it though, so have some experience of pulling it all together!)

It’s even more obvious with the launch of the new Facebook Timeline profiles. It shows how much time, effort and content we’ve all pumped into something which has inherent value in many ways, but also locks that content up inside itself.

How might it serve us, and others, to be able to set it free, and accumulate it all in the same way as Klout and Peerindex attempt to pull in our activity and interaction to assign us scores for influence? Back in June 2007 I wrote about Hasan Elahi, who created a site to which he uploaded his entire life as a response to being mistakenly put on the FBI watch list and getting detained at an airport. I’m not suggesting we auto-publish all our data all the time, and there are many privacy implications involved in that debate, but we’re all becoming auto-curators, and that could potentially lead to a second era in terms of social media and networks as that behaviour becomes part of everyday life for us all.