THE CURRENT SITUATION
Every social media site that I use has different size requirements. Not only are the size requirements different, but the aspect ration is different. For instance, Facebook recommends 1280 x 720 pixel which is a ratio of 16:9, Linked in has ratio's of either 1:2.4 or 2.4:1... you get the picture I'm sure.
So far my strategy has been to:
Establish what platforms my client would like me to use for their social media post
Keep up-to-date templates (sizes) for those platforms and use the corresponding size
This has resulted in sometimes having 4-5 image sizes per post, which is easy enough to do.
Recently video posts have been gaining more and more popularity on most platforms, and these are not only more difficult to create in their optimal sizes, but also have other stipulations such as ideal video length etc. Fair enough if this is a big campaign for a client, but what about things like MY social media posts, such as this one? Can I afford to spend extended periods of time creating video's in different sizes? Perhaps not.
MY SOLUTION
After doing my research on the 2 key platforms I am currently focusing on, which are Facebook and LinkedIn, I discovered that the delightfully simple aspect ratio of 1:1 was not only compatible for those platforms, but worked for Twitter too. To be precise the size is a 1200 pixel square. The side note on this was that this size worked well on Facebook and LinkedIn and okay on Twitter, but to keep critical elements of the design away from the top and bottom of the image. Incidentally, the formats for video which seem most acceptable by most platforms are .mov and .mp4 (just FYI)
Testing the solution
So, what I have done is create a video clip using that size and I'm going to try it out here and now and see if there are any changes to audience engagement, how it appears on those 3 platforms, etc. I hope this will be of benefit to you as I am planning on noting the results which I will share.
So, without further ado, here is the 1200 pixel video. My apologies in that it lacks finesse, but if you don't feel like reading the whole post the video clip does the trick.
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