Selecting an image for social networks

Social networks — integral part of modern life. People are used to capturing their walks, trips, going to a restaurant, meeting friends and other events on their personal accounts right away. Such platforms are actively used today to promote business. With their help, you can convey information to the target audience about goods, services, entering the market of new brands, products, etc.

Now let's take a closer look at what photo content should be for certain social networks. Let's talk about why it's so important to complement your posts with images. Let's talk about the rules that must be followed when choosing pictures for personal pages and for business. Let's dwell on the preferences of the photo content of a particular network, as well as the basic requirements for the size of images. We will tell you how to achieve the maximum effect on business promotion in social networks  using an additional connection to the work of mobile proxies.

Why is it important to pay special attention to photo content?

We will not reveal the secret if we say that visual information is absorbed much better and more efficiently than textual information. That is why social media account specialists recommend giving significant influence to photo content. But before proceeding directly to the work, it is important to understand what type of material will attract your target audience more. Here you need to find materials that cause the greatest interest among users of a particular social network. It is important to evaluate the attributes of the picture, identify patterns for yourself, find out the technical characteristics that the photo should correspond to based on the recommendation of a particular site. Only then will you be able to create content that both the platform will accept and the audience will appreciate.

The importance of supplementing posts with — This is a fact proven by numbers. Judge for yourself:

• The human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text and any other kind.
• More than 90% of all the data that enters the human brain is pictures.
• The number of people who respond better to visual data than to text is one and a half times higher.
• If a person reads the text, then after 3 days he will remember only 10% of what was stated in it. If this text is supplemented with graphic information, then after three days the same person will be able to give out about 65% of the material.
• Online articles that are enhanced with images get 90% more views on average.
• Posts with pictures get 20% more clicks, 90% more likes, and a retweet rate of over 140%.

As you can see, photo content — this is not something to neglect when dealing with your social media accounts.

Recommendations for choosing images for social networks

In order for your photo content to receive the highest level of response from the target audience, you should approach its compilation as comprehensively and versatile as possible. And our recommendations will help you with this. We would like to draw your attention to the fact that when preparing material for personal pages and for business accounts need to follow different rules.

TOP rules for selecting photos for personal social media accounts

In order to choose images for social networks that really work, you should follow these recommendations:

1. Image — this is a text display. You can’t use the first picture you like if it doesn’t reveal the meaning of your post. Moreover, using photo content from free resources will not only deprive your publication of uniqueness, but will also most likely annoy people who will see it. Therefore, it is better to use your own pictures, even from your phone, adding unique captions to them. A good option would also be a collage of several photos on a specific topic. You must understand that if the post "goes" your audience, they will like it under it and even share it with friends.
2. You must not infringe copyright. This refers to the selection of photos for placement on your page from personal photos of other people. Alternatively, you can use free photo stocks. Here, users post their own photos and their use does not violate copyright.
3. We take into account the size and orientation of the images. The fact is that some of the images during the download process may lose their quality, because the program automatically compresses them to the volumes that it needs. As a result, you can get a completely unreadable and unidentifiable picture. You should also respect the proportions and pay attention to whether an important part of the photo has been cut off.
4. Don't go overboard with fonts. To complement the image, a small text written using no more than 2-3 fonts will be enough. In this case, the choice should be stopped on the most simple options in perception. This ensures good readability of the text addition. To make a selection, you can use contrasting colors, as well as different letter sizes. The main idea should be bigger than the rest. So you can build a hierarchy even in a small post and make it more readable for readers. A good tool in the visual separation of text can be vertical or horizontal lines.
5. We keep the balance of colors. If you are not sure that you can choose the right colors for the photo itself, you can use the classic color wheel. A good option would be to use shades that are opposite each other here, those that form an isosceles triangle, as well as three adjacent tones. Of course, you can use more unexpected shades, their combination, but here you will already need a fairly good experience in design work. Of the general recommendations, one can note the use of no more than three harmonizing colors in one host. Alternatively, it can be shades of the same primary color. And it is also very important that they look contrasting against the background of the image, otherwise it will be extremely inconvenient to read the text.

TOP rules for selecting photos for business accounts

If you select images to complement your advertising posts, we recommend using the following expert advice:

• Emotional pictures evoke the greatest response from the target audience. The ones that really catch.
• If your photo — This is an advertisement for the product itself, then try to display its features to the maximum. It is also important to choose the right models. So, if you advertise cosmetics or jewelry, then beautiful girls can present all this more advantageously. But if we are talking about a chainsaw, then the beauty will look clearly out of place here and will cause potential customers more denial than the expected effect.
• At the target audience, posts with bright, light pictures get more attention and approval. Moreover, the text itself in the image should be very small. Literally one sentence aimed at attracting the attention of the reader.
• If you plan to add a logo to the picture, then it is better to place it in the upper right corner, and the text— left or center.
• Do you want to convey your product to the target audience most effectively? Take a photo with a person involved. If you are advertising a watch, it will not be enough to add a photo to the post, where the accessory is in the box. More responses will cause a picture where the watch is worn on the hand. But if there is also a person’s face in the photo, then it will take on the main focus, but the clock will already fade into the background.

Let's get acquainted with the visual secrets of various social networks

At the beginning of the review, we said that each social network has its own preferences and secrets, which, among other things, apply to images. In any case, they should be easily consumed, quickly convey the necessary information and emotions. Now let's show what preferences the most popular social networks have for photo content:

1. Instagram. These recommendations will also work well on Pinterest. Independent studies have shown that bright pictures, images with an abundance of background or empty space, and shades that converge towards blue towards the end of the spectrum attract more attention from the target audience. In this case, a single dominant tone should be clearly identified. The presence of a pronounced texture in combination with rather pale, pastel colors will also look spectacular in these social networks.
2. Facebook. Similar recommendations can also be applied to Twitter, Linkedin. Here, the priority is clarity, brightness, ingenuity and liveliness of images. If we talk about the technical component, then the pictures should be well lit. It is important that they are easy to interpret. Something creative and extraordinary would be a big plus. In these social networks, it is very important to make the image as informative as possible. That is, they should attract attention more than the text itself.

Now it remains for us to consider one more very important point in the selection of pictures for social networks — sizes.

Choosing the right illustration size for social media

In order not to encounter problems such as cropping, image quality reduction, resizing in practice, it is important to initially set your photos and images in such sizes and formats that are recommended by social networks themselves. Here are the recommendations for the most popular social networks:

• Instagram. The optimal illustration size here is 1080x1080 pixels. In the event that you decide to publish a photo of a larger size, the system will automatically crop the excess, which means that something important may be left behind the scenes. On the contrary, the application will enlarge pictures of a small resolution up to 320 pixels, which can lead to blurring, cropping, etc. We would like to draw your attention to the fact that the mobile version of the social network will display your illustration at a size of 291x291 pixels.
• Facebook. There are recommendations here, separate for different options for pictures. So, if we are talking about the profile photo of the page, then it will be cropped to a square. In the mobile version it will be displayed in the size of 128x128 pixels, and in the desktop version— 170x170 pixels. The cover of the page will be displayed in the sizes of 640x360 pixels and 820x312 pixels respectively. To ensure fast loading, you should prepare an illustration in sRGB JPG format with a size of 851x315 pixels. In this case, the weight should not exceed 100 KV. Saving files in PNG format will ensure a higher quality display of pictures on this site.
• Pinterest. All images in the feed here will be displayed with the same width — 235 pixels. In the event that the picture is too narrow, the program will crop it. Users will be able to see the full size only after directly clicking on it.
• Twitter. Here, as well as on Facebook, there are recommendations for both the profile photo and the cover photo: 400x400 and 1500x500 pixels or, respectively. In this case, the illustration format can be any: JPG, GIF PNG. But you need to understand that this social network does not support animated GIFs either as a profile picture or as a cover.
• Linkedin. There are no special recommendations here, but you need to understand that all images will be displayed in your posts with a width of 350 pixels. If the site adjusts the size of the uploaded photos, then it will retain the proportions anyway.

How to increase the efficiency of promoting goods and services through social networks?

The fact that you upload high-quality photos that fully meet the needs of a particular social network will have a significant impact on the promotion of your products or services. But still, one personal page will not be able to cover an impressive target audience. Here you can not do without the simultaneous use of several accounts. But social networks are extremely negative about such a direction as multi-accounting. They block all attempts by users to register pages from the same IP-address. But, modern technologies offer different options for circumventing such restrictions. And one of the best solutions for today — connection to the work of mobile proxies from the MobileProxy.Space service.

Such a proxy server will change the IP-address of your device either automatically by a timer in the range from 2 minutes to 1 hour, or forcibly following a link from your personal account. Thanks to this, each of your logins to different accounts will be carried out from different addresses, which means that it will not arouse any suspicions from anti-fraud systems. Additional advantages of using mobile proxies from the MobileProxy.Space service include ensuring absolute security and anonymity of actions on the network, reliable protection against hacker attacks and any other unauthorized access. You can also use them to easily bypass regional blocking by selecting the appropriate geolocation. To learn more about the functionality of this product, we recommend that you follow the link https://mobileproxy.space/en/user.html?buyproxy . It also offers a free 2-hour testing and 24/7 technical support.

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