The 2016 Social Media Image Sizes Cheat Sheet

Sometimes, one image size doesn't fit all. The 2016 Social Media Image Sizes Cheat Sheet from Hub Spot will help you optimize your images for all of your social media sites.

When you're designing cover photos, graphics, and other social media assets, sometimes knowing the bare bones image dimensions isn't enough.

What if you wanted to place text or an arrow on your Facebook cover photo without it getting covered by the profile photo? And what about the shared link thumbnails on Facebook or in-stream photos on Twitter ... how big should those be?

These change so often, a current infographic guide like this is always helpful.

What Social Media Platforms Are Best Suited For Your Business

It doesn't matter if you have a well established business or a new one, everyone can benefit from learning to use social media better. But which platform is right for you? The What Social Media Platforms Are Best Suited For Your Business infographic from Quick Sprout helps you determine which platform your target audience uses so you can save yourself some time.

With all the social media sites available today, which ones should you leverage? In an ideal world, you would use them all. As a small business, however, you don’t have enough time and money to do so.

With your limited resources, which social media platform would you pick?

If you think Facebook and YouTube are your best bets because they are most popular, think again. Just because a site is popular doesn’t mean it is a good fit for you business.

To help you decide which social media platform is best suited for your business, I’ve created an infographic that explains what social sites you should be leveraging based on real data.

Good use of colors and logos to differentiate the different services. This infographic is a good example of the difference to readers between visualized data and text-only data. Readers' attention will gravitate to the visualized statistics, and any numbers shown as just text are often skipped and considered to be secondary information.

Thanks to Juntae for the link!

Robert Scoble's 22 Tips for Improving Your Facebook Feed

Robert Scoble's 22 Tips for Improving Your Facebook Feed infographic from Joel Comm is a great summary of making your own Facebook feed useful. We all lead busy lives, but sometimes it's worth stepping back and making sure your tools are working for you the best way they can.

A few weeks ago, Robert Scoble published 22 tips for making your facebook feed better. It was some of the best, time-tested content I had read on the subject. I was so impressed that I created an infographic in order to spread his tips. With Scoble's permission, here are his 22 tips. Be sure to go to his page and show him some love! And, of course, would love for you to share this with others.

This is essentially a list infographic that includes some icons to add visual content. I'm generally opposed to a lot of text in an infographic design, but the content here is so valuable that the descriptions are necessary in the design. Sharing as an infographic image file, also makes the content easier to share online.

The footer should include the link to the infographic landing page so readers can easily find the original, full-size version when people repost the infographic without a backlink to the original.

The Internet Is a Zoo: The Ideal Length of Everything Online

Short, sweet, and to the point! The Internet Is a Zoo: The Ideal Length of Everything Online infographic from a partnership between SumAll and Buffer explains the fine line between when extra words are helpful, and when they become too much information. Whether you are posting a facebook post to your friends, or a blog post to your avid followers. This infographic will help make sure your posts reach the most readers!

Have you ever woken up in cold sweat in the middle of the night wondering exactly how many characters long a tweet should be to get the most engagement, or how many words long a blog post should be so that it actually gets read?

Ok, that may just be me, but knowing exactly how many characters a Facebook post should be or what the ideal subject line length is should be endlessly fascinating (and useful) information to most people who are active on social media.

So, to make all this data digestible and easy to understand, we partnered with our awesome friends over at Buffer to produce an infographic that shows the optimal length of pretty much everything on the internet.

Great design that tells one story really well, totally focused on the length of posts on different social media platforms. The footer should include the URL to the infographic landing page so readers can find the full-size original when the infographic is posted without links.

They went one fantastic step further, and created a more print friendly version near the bottom of the landing page that spans multiple printed pages. The pages are formatted to fit on standard Letter-size paper or in presentation slides. This is a great example of using the research and design from the original infographic to share the information in additional formats.

Infographic was found on SumAll

Hungry Tech Giants

Hungry Tech Giants is a cool infographic from Simply Business that is both zoomable and interactive!  To put them into context, the design visualizes 15 years of tech company acquisitions by Apple, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, And Facebook.

2013 was a busy year for tech acquisitions.

With competition in the tech space heating up, Apple, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook collectively executed 65 acquisitions in 2013 alone.

Yahoo was the biggest acquirer of 2013, buying a total of 25 companies following the hiring of its new CEO, Marissa Meyer.

Although Meyer is best known for her acquisition of Tumblr, the majority of her deals have bought engineering talent in an effort to build Yahoo as a serious challenger to Google.

Apple also had their biggest ever year for acquisitions in 2013, with ten purchases in total.

To see all of the acquisitions in detail, please visit our interactive microsite.

Each acquisition is appropriately placed on the timeline, and shown as a circle sized to match the total acquisition price.  Solid circles shown known prices, and open circles are not sized because the acquisition amount was never released publicly.  The circles are also color-coded to represent the different categories.

The interactivity allows you to select which categories to show, and when you hover over any particular acquisition, the acquired company name is shown with a link to the press release or news story announcing the acquisition.

The zooming controls allow you to adjust the date range shown, which helps identify many of the overlapping circles.  Clicking on the company logos on the left also brings up the data table which shows all of the known values, dates and includes the links to the press releases.  A very good way to establish credibility and make your data sources transparent.

The overall design is meant to be very detailed and allow the audience to dig in and explore the data.  At the macro level, the infographic clearly puts Facebook’s $19B acquisition of WhatsApp into context as the largest tech acquisition of all time!

Found on TechCrunch and Cult of Mac!

The Perks of Working at Google, Facebook, Twitter and More

When you get on your computer and pull up Google or Facebook, do you ever wonder about the people that make the site run? Resumebear put together an infographic for Mashable called The Perks of Working at Google, Facebook, Twitter, and More to share information like “Amenities in the Office” or “Medical and Retirement Benefits”. After reading about these jobs, you might decide to apply there yourself! 

It’s no secret that Silicon Valley has a problem finding the talent it needs to fill all the high-tech jobs available in the region. The area expects jobs in information and communications technologies to grow 15 percent during the next two years, Menlo Park Patch reports.

The trick for many employers is how to attract — and keep — the best talent in the field. Beyond handsome salaries, many tech firms also lavish their workers with benefits, leading to some unique and even quirky offerings.

Such corporate perks can be as simple (and routine) as Facebook’s discounted gym memberships or the onsite gyms at search-engine giant Google and Gaia Online, an animation-themed social networking site.

Great use of icons and illustrations to show a comparison between company benefits!

Found on mashable.com!

Battle of the (Social) Sexes

The Battle of the (Social) Sexes infographic from InternetServiceProviders.org explores some of the demographic data behind social media.

You’ve no doubt heard the old, oft-quoted adage, “men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” used to denote the fact that men and women may not always see completely eye to eye. While this light-hearted statement isn’t taken literally, when it comes to the virtual world of Internet interactions, similar sentiments may be formed surrounding the different ways men and women use social networking. While the majority of adults in the US are plugged into some sort of social media outlet, not all of them are used in equal measure, and not all of them are used by both genders equally. For instance, the average Google+ user spend just three minutes per month on the network, while the average Facebook user will spend 405 minutes per month updating statuses, posting pictures, and checking out others’ profiles. So what can be learned about men and women in the world of the web? As is turns out, men and women tend to dominate very different social media networks. The following infographic takes a look at some of the differences between male and female-dominated social media sites: How many users each one has, as well as how they interact.

There’s so really good data they have compiled in here, and most of the data visualizations are easy to understand.  I would not have expected to see that Twitter has 40 million more female users each month.

There are a handful of minor tweaks that would help improve the design:

• The salmon/orange/peach color for women is unexpected compared to the traditional pink.
• Go ahead and use the official Twitter and Facebook icons.  No need to design their own.
• The pie slices for time spent would work much better with colors that are more distinct.  The different shades of gray are very hard to differentiate.
• For the pie charts, the text label should be placed next to the pie slice its describing, instead of the opposite side as shown in this design.  Flipping the pie charts horizontally would fix that easily.

I appreciate the clear Creative Commons license in the footer, but the URL to the original infographic lansing page is missing.  Since the infographic image file is shared by itself, the URL always helps readers to find the original.

Found on Ragan’s PR Daily

Is Social Media Bad For Your Phone?

Is Social Media Bad For Your Phone? infographic from liGo gives us the price of being connected to social media on our phone.  Social media drains our phone, increases the number of car accidents, wears us down emotionaly, and has taken away some of our privacy.  You can stop the drain with a few of the infographic’s tips.

If you have a smartphone, then the chances are you’ve used social media on your mobile at one point or another. It’s great to be connected all the time, but what are the negative effects of social media on your mobile? We’ve developed an infographic to find out the answer…

Great design, with an unusual take on Social Media.

The doughnut charts are a little hard for readers to understand because they don’t start at one of the standard right angles (0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees).  By starting the segments at an odd location, it’s harder for the readers to understand how much of the permimeter is colored.

There should be the URL at the bottom that takes readers to the original full-size infographic.

Found on Infographic Journal

Job Hunting in 2013

Another social media positive! The Job Hunting in 2013 infographic from Adzuna says that 50% of Britons use social media for job hunting. Also 90% of Big British employers use social media to recruit new workers. 

In the past few months our incredible data nerds at (our snazzy new) Adzuna HQ have been witnessing something special.  So we decided to conduct a little poll, make a little infographic, and help the nation get down with, what we’re coining as, the Social Job Search Revolution. And the results were truly staggering; over 50% of you now turn to Facebook and Linked in to get hired with a little help from their friends. 

Thanks to Christian for sending in the link!

The 2012 Adobe U.S. Digital Video Benchmark

Cool infographic video from the team at Adobe that shares the results of their own 2012 Digital Video Benchmark research.

As you relax at home, walk through stores, and sit in airports, you see people watching video on more screens than ever before. But don’t rely on the eyeball test. The Adobe Digital Index team looked at 19.6 billion video starts on media websites to confirm the growth of broadcast video consumption across connected devices. See the latest video trends they uncovered for device use, ad placement, social media, and more. 

Learn more about what they found here: http://adobe.ly/ZeXLoI.

Adobe Digital Index publishes research on digital marketing based on the analysis of anonymous, aggregated data from over 5,000 companies worldwide that use Adobe Marketing Cloud.

The information is about all videos and ad placements in online videos, but the data also applies to infographic videos.  Online videos are still on the rise, and have become a very effective content and advertising platform for companies.

Clean data visualizations that I would assume were created in Adobe After Effects.  The bar charts that change size and shape in multiple directions are disconcerting though.  I can’t tell if they were appropriately adjusting the area of each bar, but I doubt it.  It looks more like a designer thought it would look unique and different without realizing that it corrupts the visualization of the data.

Thanks to Jordan from Say It Visually for sending in the linK!