Complete Guide To Social Media Sizes For 2024

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to feed. Feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host, Tracy Hazard. Today we're going to talk about our complete guide to social media sizes for 2024. So have you ever wondered, gosh, I'm creating a graphic for my episode, what size does it need to be to go on Instagram? What size should it be for TikTok or what about YouTube shorts and all these different things? We've got you covered, right, Tracy?

Absolutely. So we have obviously very large team who's doing this for many, many clients. So we've had to both figure out where the cross section is. So, like, if this is formatted right for YouTube, will it work on LinkedIn? If it's formatted right for YouTube shorts, will it work on TikTok and Instagram Reels? Like, where will it work and where's the commonality? So we've had to figure that out for our own team's purposes. So we know how many different sizes to make. Now, I'm going to say that out there, Canva makes it really confusing. Some of these tools out there make it really confusing because they offer up like, do this for Instagram, do this for Facebook, do this. And they're actually all the same size. So they make it seem more complex than it is. But that's because they found that people were going in and looking for something specific. They were trying to make an Instagram reel, or they were trying to make an Instagram post. And so they really wanted to just make it simple for you to find it in their system. But it blew everything up in terms of what you thought you had to have from sizes. So we created this size guide which allows you to go by platform and it shows you the commonality as well. Now, I'm really excited about this because we do this every year. At the end of every year, we do a complete reassessment of everything. Now we do it over the course of the year when we find something has gotten updated. So for instance, YouTube shorts got a little more definition with all the, like, usable area. So that's A little bit different than the actual physical piece you make. So we have sizes for the physical space that you has to be. It's X number of pixels by Y number of pixels. Right. Like that's what it is. But that doesn't mean everything's visible within that space. There isn't something that covers it. There might be a profile Image on a LinkedIn banner, or there might be play a play bar on YouTube. Right. Like, those things cover stuff up. So usable area is also something that we have to define so we don't put text in the wrong space.

Oh, my goodness, Tracy, that is huge. Really. It's not just the technical specs, which may be accurate, but not necessarily practical. And I've seen this happen a lot where we have this social share asset and we put it up there and then YouTube puts something up that's completely covering some of the important information. I mean, what a mistake that would be.

Yeah. So I'm just showing you here. So we call it the safe zone. Right. That's usable area. And so, like you can see here if you're not watching the video for this and you're not listening to it on the podcast, but if you're watching the video, I'm showing you a segment that we updated in the middle of the year for YouTube shorts. So we don't normally update these things in the middle of the year unless something significant changes. And we will update it throughout the year. So when you come Back to the 2023 guide, for instance, you'll be coming back to the most updated version of it. But heading into the new year, when this episode will be airing is in the new year, you'll be able to get the 2024 version. So at the end of every year, we reevaluate all the platforms and take a look and see is there new best practices? Has sizes changed? Have things been updated in a way that even though the size is exactly the same, but where they place the profile photo, it actually covers up something important? So we do that regularly and we do that at the end of every year. This year I'm really excited about it, Tom, because we're actually going to consolidate our three different guides. We're going to consolidate the size guide, the posting guide, and our partnership with Angie Lyle at Holistic Media. She has added to it her social media best practices. So we're going to have a little Holistic Media sidebar that gives you some tips on posting that you may not have heard about. Like the best time of day to post, how many times should you be posting whether or not there's a shoppable link available in that type of post. Like, so some really cool things that she's helped us add and we're going to be incorporating that in. So by the time this episode actually airs in the podcast, that will be all updated. So for all of our clients, of course, you're going to get an email out and it's going to give you the new link to the new post and you can stop going back to the 2023 version, you can go to the new 2024 version, and it'll automatically be in the right place for you to be able to do that. But some things that I really wanted to make you aware of today, really is this idea that these sizes are very hard to find. So if you have to actually go in to the channel, click on it and try to update your profile to find out what the sizes are. Because if you do a Google search, or even if you do a help search sometimes within the social platform, nine times out of 10, it's out of date. They don't get to updating their tutorials, they don't get to updating the information. So the only place that the information is is if I click on the LinkedIn banner for my company page, for instance, and I click on it to update it, it'll tell me what size it to be. That's the only place. So you're going to have to go in and go everywhere to figure this out for yourself. Well, unless, yeah, you'll load it in and then you'll go, oh, look, that logo where I had my company logo is being covered up by my head, like in my profile. It's not working for me.

Oh, my gosh.

That's why this guide is so valuable.

I'm an example of this. And I'm. I'm going to embarrass myself slightly, but for the benefit of our listeners, my LinkedIn banner is several years old and if you look at it, there's this big empty space right in the center of it. And that's because at that time LinkedIn put your headshot in a circle right there. So my banner on my LinkedIn page was made so that we didn't put any logos there.

A half circle.

Yeah, a half circle space there for. And then they updated it and moved the headshot over to the left. So now it's covering up part of the information we were trying to show. And shame on me, I should have updated by now, and now I'm going To need to. So now I've got a challenge. So, Tay, if you, any of you listening to this podcast, want to go check me out, Tom has it on LinkedIn. Go see if I've updated that banner. But if I have, which I better by then, by the time this is a podcast, those of you watching this live right now could go check it out right now, but probably laughing. Yeah, I mean, my LinkedIn profile is pretty good, but it needs a little.

I'm probably laughing and going, oh, yeah, really outdated, Tom.

But what we can do is take a screenshot of it now and we'll have it in the blog post. And by the way, since I've jumped in here for a moment with this comment, Tracy, I just want to let our podcast listeners know you definitely are going to want to go look at the video. Tracy shared something about that usable area. What did you call it? I don't even remember what you call it now. The safe zone. She shared her screen and so you can watch this video.

Safe zone. Yeah, it's a safe zone.

Podcasters united.org that's where our blogs are now. So you definitely going to want to go check that. That out.

Right?

And so this is what I want everybody to be aware of. So also within podcasters united.org when you go there, there's a tip library section. And in the tip library section, you can ch type in social media s guide, social media banners. You can type that in as a topic. And social media is its own category because we have so many topics we cover on that. So it's its own category. You can just go peruse the category. It will always be updated with the latest guide that we have. So we do not create a one that's for 2022, 2023. No, it's the latest one. If there's a tip there, it's updated. And so it has the latest guide that we have available at this time. So right now you're still seeing 2023 guide, although by the time you get to this podcast episode airing and publishing, you'll have the 2024 guide as well.

I know our team and even you, Tracy, because this is your particular area of interest. You really champion this and help make sure we maintain this on a regular basis. You guys have been working on this for quite a while this year.

So this will be our fourth year putting out this. We've done. We started doing it in 2020, so this will be our fourth year. The 2024 version will be our fourth year doing this. And every year there's something new we really add to it and learn. Like last year we added the and we didn't incorporate it in. We kept the post guide separate. And the post guide is really kind of cool as well because it has something different in what we do. And I'm going to share my screen for those of you who can see that. Can you see the post guide? Okay, so we show you what an authority building post would be like. So where you might want to start out with a compelling statement, you might want to state the introduction of your key points, you might want to have some bullets, you might want to use some emojis, you might want to have hashtags like we show you what that is, what the optimum look for that is this one in particular is LinkedIn. But you can do the same style posts on Facebook. So these are just some of the ways that we show what might be opportunities. We also show you what an episode social share might look like so that you have an understanding of how to share an episode as opposed to how to make a salesy post that you might do for your business. In exchange of that, we show you how to promote guests. So we're just really talking about podcast specific type of posts and styles and best practices of things that you might want to do. What I'm really excited is that we'll be adding in the holistic medias Angie Lyle's guide for this and she's got some great ideas like adding collaboration into your guest posting. And we're going to have a little call out box for what that looks like and how you do it. So these, we're not being specific about which type of channel you put this.

In, which platform you're going to post to which platform.

Because you could do this in Facebook, you could do it in Instagram, you could do it in LinkedIn. There's nuances to the amount of text you're allowed to do and some amount of length of things, but it gives you a general sense of like how to do it and what to do with it. And so that's what we really wanted to do is just give you some best practices. So if you've never created a social media post before, if you're brand new to it, this is just a starting guide. You're going to learn what your audience responds to and engages with. But this gives you just a starting guide and some best practices that those of us who are pros at this utilize. And especially Angie and her team adding their stuff in here is great. Like the number of hashtags, it's so important, like they have an optimum level that they've discovered doing this for some really high profile influencers who we only have anecdotal, like across a thousand podcasts, so it's not too anecdotal, but across a thousand podcasts, what's working?

You know, I'll tell you, Tracy. Yeah. Awkward pause. So I've just. So many things going through my head. So when you were talking, pause about.

Awkward pause there.

If you've never created a social post before, and in my head I was kind of chuckling, thinking, is anybody who's watching this live on social media or listening to this podcast actually never made a social post before? And I guess that's possible, although it's probably the very, very small minority of people that are watching this video, listen to the podcast or on live on social right now. But then I realized I make all kinds of social posts on my own. I also, we have some done for us like on my LinkedIn, I don't think I post anything personally. We have team that posts on my LinkedIn. But I know how to make social posts. But do I know how to make a good one? Do I know what the best practices are or some of the do's and don'ts? And especially again, coming back to what you shared earlier, that safe zone, that is, I'll tell you what, anyone listening to this podcast, watching that video, and if you came in late and you didn't see at the beginning, you want to go back. Because that safe zone is next level. Nobody is actually telling you that on these platforms. It's experimental, isn't it?

No, I mean, this is the thing. Look, we think that the program we're using to create the clips is going to do it for us. Whether we're using Opus Pro, we're using video, we're using canva, we're using any one of these tools and we think that they're going to do it for us. Their big concern is the overall space they're not thinking about. Did my caption go too low? Did the little animated emoji I put in there, is it being interfered with by the player piece? Like they're not looking at that from that perspective. So this is where it's important for us. If we are creating a thumbnail of some kind that's going to be shown on our videos, or we're creating something where we want critical piece of information like our URL to be shown or our podcast watermark, or she can do it in a watermark, which is like, I'm going to call it like a shadow impression, where it looks like it's a part of the transparent part of the video as opposed to just a big cover art piece that is like standing out as an icon on our video. We can decide where those things go, but sometimes the position that we decide to put them in is completely covered up by the likes and the shares and the tools that are available in YouTube, which means that the viewers aren't getting them. And that's why safe area is so important. If you need to put something critically important, it must go in the safe area. It doesn't mean you can't use the other space. It doesn't mean you should block any of it out. But a lot of people are putting a lot of over branding everywhere and it's all going in the unusable space. So it doesn't make any sense to be doing. It.

Makes so much sense on the one hand, but I guarantee you, many people listening to this that put things out on social media don't spend an awful lot of time analyzing their own posts. Right. Or you put up a YouTube short, great, you put it up, you posted it. Do you actually watch your own short to see how it appears in context?

I think that's really the biggest issue here is that they don't watch it. You don't watch your own stuff. I don't like to watch my own videos. Like I don't like to hear my own voice. Right. I don't listen back to my own podcast. Right. We don't do that enough. And because we don't do that, we don't get a sense of it. The only thing we notice is like, wow, that got 300 views and that's three times more than I got last week. And they get excited about it, but they also don't know why.

To me, this is as simple as what, what I could compare this to. I do a lot of direct email marketing to podcasters, do free live sessions to help share things that I think are going to be of interest and importance to them. And there are usually one or two links in every one of those emails. And it's as simple as, oh, did I test those links before I sent out the email and make sure they go where I think they're going to go. I mean, you may have had a typo, you may have copied an email that you used in the past and not updated the link. I mean, it's sort of one on one type of stuff. When you think about it, test your stuff. And I do think you're right, Tracy. Podcasters don't listen to their own shows enough. I'm not saying you have to listen to every episode. I don't want to listen to myself. I don't like it either. But yeah, you want to make sure your content is the same. You gotta spot check having the same impact and impression you think it will or you hope it will. You gotta spot check. You gotta watch an episode once in a while. You gotta listen to your prerecorded intro, actually that I'd recommend you listen to like five times over and see if you want to blow your brains out before listening the sixth time or if it's okay. It's short and sweet, it does its job, it's not too long, hint, hint, hint. A lot of you probably have a long one. But anyway, these sorts of things, I think it's just a good time, repetitive, talking about the social media size guide and being having awareness of things that may not be obvious. It's a good time to take stock in general. Sorry, not to get too far off topic, Tracy. I think it's a good tip. Right?

And so. No, no, no. I think that this is really important and this is one of the things that we do because we look at this globally across all of our clients and, and we look at across all of our platforms and the best practices and what we do and what we're finding is working that we've come up with, I'm going to say, a pattern recognition that not many people get to see. And that's also what Angie has done with hers. And Holistic Media's guide as well is seeing a very different level of best practices. And so us teaming up on this is so exciting. And I'm really looking forward to what that more comprehensive guide looks like in the next 30 days as we post it out and publish it. And we're all going to be using that. What I invite you to do is share it with your service providers, with your virtual assistants, with your team internally. Use this, make some notes on it for yourself. Like if you want to deviate from what we're. We are making generalized recommendations, but that doesn't mean that's what you want to do. And if you say I want my logo to always be in this top left corner, no matter what it is, then you make that as your own guide, add it to it, make a little box and note on our guide. It's a PDF. Go ahead and make comments on it, use it and customize it for yourself, handwrite on it and hand it to your team. Like, whatever you're comfortable with, do it and use it. Because when you use this, it is going to make everybody's job easier, easier. And then there will be streamlined communication and you're not going to be surprised when you accidentally pop onto TikTok and go, what the heck just happened there? How did this get so far off track from what you set at the beginning?

Tracy, that's really good advice. I tell new podcasters that we're supporting when they're going through the onboarding process. I tell them, or other people on our staff like Melissa will tell them, here's what we recommend and here's the good reason why we recommend it. Now, at the end of the day, it's their show. They have a business decision to make. Hey, we're just going to give you from our experience and what we know what our recommendation is, but that may not be in alignment with your needs or goals. By all means deviate. Although, Tracy, it is one of my peeves when we get like PR people or branding people or customers that have a branding consultant and the branding consultants want everything to be consistent everywhere. They always want the brand to be dominant, to be displayed on every single image, everywhere it goes or every video, and always in the same way, like you said. And that's kind of one of my pet peeves because it really ignores the context. And really what you explained With Safes on YouTube is one good example of that. But branding people, I guess they're comfortable with consistency and constancy and everything appearing the same everywhere. But it just, it really, to me, that bugs me. I don't like that because it ignores context.

So, look, we want a level of professionalism. Angie Lyle and I have a lot of discussions about this. It's like she's got these top profile clients and she wants to get them to make sure they have the best video, the best sound. But it's better to have something posted that is authentic and an important, critical message at the right time than it is to make sure you have perfect lighting to make sure that you have this branding is put in place. If you're missing your window by saying, I have to send this to my team and they have to drop it in the template and they need to make sure that the logo's in the right place. And now you're three weeks behind the trend that was going on on social media, what's the point? So if it makes so much more work for yourself, it's not worth doing. And that's what we've come to here, is we would much rather let go of that, over controlling over branding and have social media be dynamic and on time and right at the right moment in time, because that's a problem with social media. It's here today, gone tomorrow. We know that this is the case. Anything on TikTok, if it's three hours old, it's old. If it's 20 minutes old in TikTok, in Twitter or X, it's gone. Like, just don't even bother. So these are really what we have to tap into. And so that's why we need something quick, easy, a guide to be able to get us started, do what we can, but let's not overthink this. Let's post it. If we make a mistake, do better next time. Because it's gone, don't worry, it's not there anymore. Especially if. If it's a story on Instagram, it's gone 24 hours later. So don't worry about it. If it's in Snapchat, it's gone. Don't worry about it. Right? These are not the things we need to get stressed about. Use the tools that we provided here for you and go out there and share your podcast. That's what we want you to do. Now, the number one thing, Tom, that we get asked here at Potatius all the time is, when are you going to post on social? For me, it's not going to happen. I'm just going to tell you that we are not in the business of social media. Angie's in the business of social media. If you need somebody to post for you, go see Angie. Like, really, please go to Holistic Media and check them out. But the reality is, is that there's so much that needs to be done, and this is some of the new guide that we're going to be having and incorporating is Angie's telling you when it's better for you to post in the app. And I'm going to remind you that if your goal is to grow your Instagram, if your goal is to grow your Snapchat, if your goal is to grow your TikTok, absolutely. Post in the app. Do it. If that's your goal.

Are you saying post in the app, like actively, organically, not using a scheduler? Is that what you're saying? Okay, yes.

But if it's the difference between you posting and you not posting because you just need the scheduler because your time is so busy and you're never going to get around to dropping that post in use the scheduler. So if it's a difference between you not posting or posting, use the scheduler. It's so much easier for those of us that are really busy and have a lot on our plate, or those of us that really need to use a team. That team is working overnight for us because they're overseas and we don't have the ability to be able to schedule in the app, or we don't want to give them access to our Instagram or to our LinkedIn or to those things, which you really shouldn't. They're in violation of the policies of most of those platforms. So unless that person is really in control of your social media all for you, you should be doing that yourself. Be thinking about that. But if your strategy for the next year is for you to really grow and blow out your Instagram, you're going to need to use the in app tools. It is just going to be critically important for you to follow some of these best practices like the influencers do if you want to compete. So this is one of the reasons why we put all of these things in here, is to make sure that you understand if this is your strategy when you need to pay attention to this more. But I'm going to say to you, my last piece of advice before we stop this episode here is it is better to be posting and sharing and be imperfect than let the perfection and all of these things that you're supposed to think about get in your way of posting. That is, these tools are here to make your job easier, to make your sharing easier, make your team more optimum, to do the best that we can for you to make this simpler. But they are not here for you to agonize over them and get in the way of you sharing your podcast.

So it's better to be doing it however you're doing it, rather than to wait until you get it perfect or what you think is perfect. And honestly, Tracy, that's similar advice to what I give a lot of podcasters when I'm doing a podcast power appraisal for their show. And they're not doing any blog posts, they don't have their own website. There's certain things they're doing which are truly not recommended in terms of best practices. But they're recording their message. They're publishing it to the world as a podcast. Yes, if that's all you can do, that's step one. By all means do it even though right. Keep adding layers upon Layers of improvement.

Then level up and make sure that.

It'S processes maybe getting some paid support at some point because at some point you don't have enough bandwidth yourself. But get keep publishing consistently and constantly with your podcast. That's number one for any of us listening to this podcast, seeing this live stream or watching any of the video recordings on YouTube.

Yeah, you look we say this here and I was noticing when I was looking over Angie's notes for what we're going to add. It's like every single one. Consistency is key. Consistency is key. So if it's key in podcasting, it's key in social media. If you keep consistent in podcasting, you're going to be consistent in posting on social like it's you're creating that model for yourself. You're creating a system system where you should have more likelihood for success because you're being more consistent than the next person.

And you know what? I've seen it over and over in my career. Those that show up most tend to win.

That's right. And that's why I'm so grateful to the people who show up here for our coaching call. They show up on Zoom from our client base, but they show up on the live streams out in social media. Thank you all for being here. Like it's really. It makes this easier for Tom and I to get excited about what we're going to talk about next, be thinking about what's coming up because we know you're going to be there and it's important to you to take time to do this and if you're taking your time, we want to respect that and give you the most value we can.

Sounds like a great note to wrap up on Tracy. Well, hey everyone, remember you are definitely going to want to go to see the blog post for this feed your brand episode on podcasters united.org website. That's pretty straightforward. Just go there and check it out. It is relatively new location where we're putting all this content, but the video is there. The audio as well is there of course as well, but images, screenshots, check out my LinkedIn banner just so you can see what we were talking about earlier and as an example of what not to do. Perfectly honest there. Anyway, that's where you can check out everything. Please go check it out and especially if you're listening only.

Well, thanks everyone for being here. We'll be back next week with another feed your brand, another live stream and another coaching call.

Heard something valuable today but didn't get a chance to write it down. No worries, we've got you covered. We partnered up with podcasters united.org where podcast hosts like you can get free resources, free masterclasses, the largest podcast tip library assembled, and free promotion opportunities. While you're there, don't forget to follow us on YouTube and on social media at United Wepod so you can get feed your brand live. Until next time, keep podcasting.