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!

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

House of Cards: Power Connections

We’ve all have heard the saying, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”  The House of Cards: Power Connections infographic from Linkedin brilliantly uses the House of Cards show to show a good example of being connected. How powerful is your connection network?

Relationships Matter

From college internships to becoming President of the United States, who you are connected to and how you leverage those connections matters.

We wrote the post 4 sales strategy lessons from Frank Underwood to take some learnings from the show and how they can apply to your professional growth. It was an amazing use of social media that we got a response from the House of Cards Twitter profile and felt we should lean-in on some of the content.

The best way for us to illustrate the valuable connections of a character like Frank Underwood is to create a LinkedIn InMap infographic with Frank at the center.

I love the idea of using a famous fictional person to show the “Power of Connections” instead of a real person that people might not be familiar with. Color-coding is always a helpful tool to minimize words on an infographic, and it’s used well here. Also, the use of faces for the key people on the graphic break up the names to keep it interesting. However, the reasoning behind the use of different sizes of circles around the names is unclear. Always make sure to include the URL of the infographic landing page at the bottom so that viewers can find the original.

This is based on the same network map visualization tool that you can use to automatically visualize your own connections on Linkedin.  Login with your Linkedin account on the Linkedin Labs page: http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/

Found posted on Google+ by Jason Lankow

Cool Infographics: Best Practices Group on LinkedIn

I am excited to announce the launch of a new LinkedIn Group, Cool Infographics: Best Practices. I have personally been a part of many great discussion groups over the years and believe that this group fills an unmet need.  Please accept this invitation to join the group to share your own experiences and wisdom.

There are many groups that share infographics, but I felt that a discussion group dedicated to the craft of infographics and data visualization was missing.  This group will feature questions and case studies about how companies are leveraging infographics and data visualization as a communication tool.  Any posts that are just links to infographics will be moderated to keep the focus on engaging discussions.  Topics and questions from the Cool Infographics book will also be discussed.

Join us in a professional dialogue surrounding case studies and strategies for designing infographics and using them as a part of an overall marketing strategy.  We welcome both beginning and established professionals to share valuable tactics and experiences as well as fans of infographics to learn more about this growing field.

-Randy

17 LinkedIn Profile Must-Haves

17 LinkedIn Profile Must-Haves is a how-to infographic that walks the reader through optimizing their LinkedIn profile page.  Published by MarketMeSuite working with Maximize Social Business.com’s Neal Schaffer.

This year has been a big one for LinkedIn. With new features like the Creative Portfolio Display, you now have the ability to visually showcase your professional portfolio. But before diving any deeper with the latest add-ons, does your LinkedIn profile have all the elements that will help you rise to the top? This new infographic has all the tips you need to elevate your LinkedIn profile: 17 LinkedIn Profile Must-Haves!  Everyone can use great tips, so please share the LinkedIn love!

Great design using a mock LinkedIn profile as the background.  The callouts are clearly connected to the appropriate areas on the profile.  There’s a lot of text, but in this case I think most of it is necessary to clearly explain each point.  The reader can work off of this infographic without any additional research on other sites.

The statistics at the bottom should have been better visualized.  Mixing the 50.5% stat with the profile complete percentage visual from LinkedIn is confusing.  Also, it was difficult for me to find the original infographic landing page.  The footer should have the URL for readers to find the full-size original version of the infographic.  The source list text is too small to read too.

Thanks to Martin Mosler for post on Google+!

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!

The Ecosystem of Linkedin

LinkedIn has reached over 200 million members worldwide, making it the world’s largest professional network. The Ecosystem of LinkedIn infographic from Dynamic Search explains why LinkedIn is a must have tool for everyone.

The Ecosystem of LinkedIn includes how LinkedIn works and what you should really know. What’s the difference between endorsement and recommendation? What about job search,  personal or company profile, groups and connections? Below is the infographic that will simplify LinkedIn for you. Are you an employee or business owner? If so, you should have a profile on LinkedIn. Enjoy.

This design does a good job of using illustrations and diagrams to add a visual element to abstract concepts like connections and recommendations.  The text descriptions could have been simplified even further to remove more text from the design.

The footer should have included a copyright or Creative Commons license, and the URL link back to the landing page so readers could find the original, full-size version.

Thanks to Nicole for sending in the link!

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

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!