What size image should you use as your Facebook cover photo? What works best on LinkedIn? How long do posts last on Snapchat? You’re in the right place to find out.
Every day I am contacted by people wanting to share their articles, recommendations, courses and content with readers of my blog. The majority of the time I say no because it’s not appropriate, is pure marketing, or clear the person hasn’t read my guidelines.
I’ll perhaps add it to my Rachel’s resources page, pin images to my Pinterest boards or feature the event on my comms calendar.
However, sometimes I think it’s worth a post of its own and that’s the case today. Chris Norton @chris_norton (pictured) is Managing Director of Prohibition PR, and is a fellow co-author of Share This Too: More Social Media Solutions for PR Professionals (Wiley, 2013).
Chris recently got in touch with an “ultimate social network cheat sheet” infographic to help you navigate through the best ways to make the most of various social networks, and I thought I’d share it on.
Writing on the Prohibition PR blog, he states:
It is fair to say that it seems that everyone these days is glued to social media. Whether it’s a continuous stream of tweets or a selfie in every location known to man, we are now a generation obsessed with sharing.
With most social media users accessing platforms on the go from their phones and tablets it’s no wonder that the posts that grab the most engagement include some form of image or video, they are fun and easy to view and stand out from the sea of text based posts on users’ newsfeeds. This is why picture and video apps like Instagram and Vine have become increasingly popular, it’s true what they say, pictures really can say a thousand words.
When it comes to engagement, posts that include photos get around 39%* more interaction that posts without. Facebook and Twitter are constantly updating their apps and sites to provide the best platforms for media sharing and there are now thousands of ways to stand out from the crowd using visual media.
Here are our top five tips for sparking engagement using photos and videos on social media:
- Have a caption contest. Get your followers involved by letting them come up with an amusing caption for your image, it gets conversation going and a bit of healthy competition.
- Use quote pictures followers identify with quotes and then want to share them. It’s a win-win.
- Have a message to go with you image, whether it’s a team picture or a new product, have a message to go along with your image. Make sure you have all links included too.
- Use short video clips there’s a reason why apps like Vine and Snapchat are so popular, their videos are short sharp clips that can be filmed quickly and watched anywhere.
- Make sure your image fits, there is nothing worse than uploading amazing images to your social media channels only to find that they don’t sit properly or don’t look as good as they did on your phone.
On that note, we put our heads together at Prohibition HQ and decided to create a resource that would help anyone looking to amend their social media channels.
We have created the Ultimate Social Media Cheat Sheet to help you quickly check the best formats for posting pictures and videos across the most popular social media platforms. Feel free to go through it and use it at your leisure. Did we miss something off the cheat sheet? If so what was it?
You can get in touch with Chris @chris_norton.
Want to see more infographics on similar topics? – see my social media Pinterest board.
To read more about social media, see all posts I’ve written on the topic.
You can find me online including:
Twitter @AllthingsIC, Google+, LinkedIn, Storify, SlideShare and Pinterest .
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Rachel
Here’s Chris’ infographic:
Post author: Rachel Miller
First published on All Things IC blog 15 September 2014.
