The Ideal Facebook Cover Photo Size And How To Make Yours Stand Out (Including 12 Excellent Examples)

This post was originally written on April 7, 2016, and we have just updated it with the latest information.

The Facebook cover photo. It feels like it should be so easy to pick one, and yet finding the perfect image feels super hard at the same time.

You only get one; one photo, one shot to make a good impression, one chance to convey a distinct feeling, so what should it be?

Your Facebook cover photo is one of the first things people will see when they visit your Facebook page, and that is exactly why it is so important to make the best first impression possible and for the cover photo to convey exactly what it is you are aiming for. Even though it sounds simple, we’ve found that it’s pretty tough! No worries, though, we’re here to help you.

Let’s jump in and figure out the best way to make the most out of your Facebook cover photo, together.

In this article, we’ll do three things:

1. Introduce you to the Facebook cover photo and ideal dimensions
2. Guide you through how to create a cover photo and how to select the perfect image
3. Provide some examples of Facebook Pages with brilliant cover photos

Once you’ve got your cover image sizes, we’d love to help schedule and analyze your posts — so you can drive more Facebook traffic and engagement in less time.

Let’s begin with a quick summary of cover photos and the best image size to use…

What’s the ideal size for a Facebook cover photo?

820 pixels wide by 462 pixels tall

The best image size to use for your Facebook cover is … well, it can vary. According to Facebook, your cover photo:

• Displays at 820 pixels wide by 312 pixels tall on your Page on desktops and 640 pixels wide by 360 pixels tall on smartphones
• Doesn’t display on non-smartphones
• Must be at least 399 pixels wide and 150 pixels tall
• Loads fastest as an sRGB JPG file that’s 851 pixels wide, 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes

Whoa, okay. So what does all of that mean?

It means that even though we only get one photo, Facebook is going to use it in two very different ways:

• in the rectangular format of 820 pixels wide by 312 pixels tall for desktop;
• and the ever-so-slightly more squarish format of 640 pixels wide by 360 pixels tall for mobile.

If you want to use a single image that works pretty well on both desktop and mobile, 820 pixels wide by 462 pixels tall seems to be the best (see example below).

New: Cover video!

You can now use a video, instead of a static cover photo. With a video, you can share more about your business and tell a longer story.

Here are the specifications:

• It should be at least 820 pixels wide by 312 pixels tall.
• It can be 20 to 90 seconds long.

Pro Tip: If you found an image or video that you love and the dimensions are a bit off, you can still use it! You’ll want to choose that image or video (or upload it), and then you’ll be allowed to ‘reposition’ it. With the reposition feature, Facebook is essentially allowing you to crop your cover photo in a way that you think best fits in the space.

Desktop vs. Mobile

It’s great always to be mindful that cover photos on desktops and cover photos on mobile look different.

For example, here’s how a cover photo looks on a desktop:

And here’s how it looks in the Facebook mobile app:

They look similar, but there is a slight difference:

On mobile, the top and bottom portions are slightly expanded — by 75 pixels each to be precise — assuming you didn’t reposition the photo. The parts highlighted in red are not shown on your Page when viewed from a computer.

What’s cool here is that Facebook doesn’t stretch and squeeze the same image, they change the crop. This is awesome because it ensures that your image looks its best by not distorting anything.

Desktop sizing guide

With the new Facebook Page design, all the things that used to be on top of your cover photo (such as your profile image, Page name, Like button, etc.) are moved out of the cover photo — yay!

Double check your design on mobile

If you’re using text on your cover photo, like a call-to-action (CTA), you’ll want to pop over to the Facebook mobile app to take a peek just to make sure there’s nothing wonky going on. For example, if your cover photo is not tall enough, the sides of your photo (or a few characters of your CTA) might be cropped away on the mobile app.

How to create your cover photo

If you have some design skills, creating your own cover photo from the ground up using software like Photoshop is an excellent way to go. Going this route allows you to create a pixel-perfect representation of how you want to portray yourself or your business.

Photoshop cover photo templates

To help you to jump straight into designing, we’ve created a Facebook cover photo template (820 x 462px).

This is how it looks like on desktop and mobile:

You can see an example of this here. (Hat tip to Cover Photo Size Helper – so helpful!)

Here are a few extra details for designers to consider about your Page’s profile picture:

• Displays at 170×170 pixels on your Page on computers, 128×128 pixels on smartphones, and 36×36 pixels on most non-smartphones
• Will be cropped to fit a square

We know that we might not all be designers, but that doesn’t mean we can’t all have a beautiful Facebook cover photo. Here are some places you can look at to create your cover as well as some tips for making sure it fully represents you and your business.

Your photos

Your Facebook cover photo should be all about you or your business, so why not use one of your photos that represent you?

During our Madrid retreat, we took a team photo, which became our Facebook cover photo for several months.

Stock photos

If you don’t have any personal photos you would like to share, how about using a beautiful stock photo? We even shared 53 free image sources for you to find the perfect image for your cover photo. My favorite websites to find beautiful stock photos are Unsplash and Pixabay.

If the license of the photo allows, I would encourage you to edit or enhance whatever photo you pick with Pablo, Canva, or PicMonkey to make it more personal. For example, you could pick one of your favorite quotes and lay it over the photo, and Pablo even has a few beautiful quotes you can pick directly in there.

Canva

If you don’t want to use a photo or if you’d like even more help to create your cover photo, Canva offers pre-made templates for you to use and customize however you would like.

To find these templates on Canva, select “More…” when you are creating a design and look for “Facebook cover”.

How to select your cover photo

Now that we know how to create your cover photo, the question is what kind of cover photo you should select? Are there cover photos that work best than others? Let’s investigate.

Best practices

First up, let’s discuss some of the best practices when it comes to a Facebook cover photo. Hubspot has put together a great list of Do’s and Don’ts when it comes to cover photos. Here are some of the highlights:

• Follow Facebook’s guidelines
• Respect Facebook’s required dimensions (820px wide by 312 px tall for desktops)
• Stay mainly visual and have a clear focal point
• Keep in mind how your cover photo will look like on mobile
• Integrate your cover photo design with the rest of your page

What type of image attracts people?

We looked into some of the components that make images shareable which turned out to be:

• Emotion: Making people feel, leads them to take action
• Relevance: Including something that fits with your audience’s interest
• Colors: Picking the right colors that will lead to the most shares
• Typography: Choosing the right font that will make your message clear
• Hashtags and Text: Find the right words that will lead your audience to interact

These components can also be applied to your Facebook cover photo to make people feel a certain way or take a specific action when they come to your page.

For example, Coca-Cola’s cover photo shows several happy young adults clinking their coke bottles. This is likely to be in the hopes of making people feel happy when thinking of Coca-Cola and to make the connection in people’s mind that drinking a coke means happiness. Straightforward and effective!

 

Where do people look?

When coming up with your perfect cover photo, it might be interesting to look into some eye tracking studies. Something that I found particularly interesting in an article from Kissmetrics on the subject is the idea of “directional queues.”

It was found that if you would like to draw attention to a particular item in an image, having a visual queue like a person’s gaze looking at that item will guide viewers to what they should look at next. This could be an interesting way to use a person’s gaze in your Facebook cover photo.

Something else Kissmetrics found that might be worth playing around with is to include an element that “pops” in your cover photo. That element should be the one that matters and the one that calls for action.

For example, when HubSpot launched their Summer Startup competition, they changed their cover photo to encourage people to apply.

Thinking outside the box

The cover photo is a great way to express yourself but also a way to stand out when people visit your page. Here are some ways you can use your cover photo:

• Use your cover photo to promote your social media campaigns

• Change your cover photo based on special occasions, events, sales, or holidays

• Use your cover photo to send people to a special offer

• Ask your fans to “Like” your page
• Ask your fans to share your page
• Include Easter Eggs that lead fans to a special giveaway or special event

Who does it well? A showcase of great cover photos and videos

Now that we know what makes a good Facebook cover photo, how about we take a look at some of the Pages that do it well? Hopefully, you might find some inspiration

Photos

Videos

Over to you

Before I turn it over to you, I have one last cover photo I wanted to share with you… yes you guessed it, it’s the Buffer cover video!

With this video, we wanted something that reflects what Buffer is, and Buffer is nothing without the people behind it.

Our team is such an integral part of Buffer that it makes sense the team would earn the coveted cover photo spot on Facebook. The video also gives a face to the company that people can connect with, and as our community is very important to us, it seems like the perfect choice.

Oh, and by the way: Buffer can help you schedule and analyze your Facebook posts — so you can drive more Facebook traffic and engagement in less time.

I would love to hear your thoughts

What about you? How do you use your Facebook cover photo? Do you have any tips or suggestions on what makes a good one?

I would love to hear all your thoughts and ideas in the comments so that we can all create the best cover photos ever!

Thank The Ideal Facebook Cover Photo Size And How To Make Yours Stand Out (Including 12 Excellent Examples) for first publishing this post.

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How to Keep Up With Social Media News in Just 10 Minutes a Day

Keeping up with new changes on the various social media platforms is essential to staying ahead on social media.

Did you know for example that Facebook now allows you to upload GIFs? Or that Facebook has also changed the News Feed to encourage high-quality links to be shared?

If a piece of social media news is big enough (such as the launch of Instagram Stories), we’ll usually read about it online on the day itself or the next. Or hear about it from our colleagues and friends.

But if it’s a tiny update (such as tweaks to the Facebook algorithm, new objectives for Instagram Stories ads, or Pinterest removing its Like button), we might not hear about it until a few days or weeks later. Yet, these tiny changes can be important and can influence our social media strategy.

So how can you keep up-to-date with all the latest and breaking social media news without sacrificing too much of your time?

In this post, we’ll share some tools, tips, and tricks to help you stay up to date with social media news in just 10 minutes a day.

5 Ways of Staying Up to Date with Social Media News

Since we all have different preferences for keeping up with news, we’ll do this Choose Your Own Adventure style. Click on the link that represents you the most to get started.

• I like getting news direct from the source.
• I like getting news from reading news sites or blogs.
• I like getting news from social media.
• I like getting news via email.
• I like getting news from listening to podcasts or shows.

If more than one of the options resonates with you, feel free to check out all those sections.

If you like getting news direct from the source

The major social media platforms announce most of their updates and changes on their newsroom or company blogs. This is the best method to get official news from the social media companies themselves.

Here are the respective newsrooms and company blogs:

• Facebook Newsroom: Facebook put their news into several helpful categories. You might be most interested in Product News, News Feed FYI, and Measurement FYI.
• Instagram Business blog: Instagram tends to share business-related news (such as new business features or new ad options) on their business blog. While they share a mix of announcements, best practices, and case studies, you can opt to read announcements only.
• Instagram blog: If you are more interested in new user features (such as archiving posts on your profile and organizing your saved posts), you can find such news on the Instagram blog under the “#Instagram News” tag.
• Twitter blog: Twitter writes about top events, insights from their data, new features, and their company on their blog. If you are curious only about changes to the Twitter product itself, check out their product news section.
• Snap News: Snap Inc. shares mostly product news about Snapchat and Spectacles and occasionally company news on their news page.
• Oh, How Pinteresting!: Pinterest shares a mix of new features, Pinterest tips, trends on Pinterest, and company news on their blog. There doesn’t seem to be a way to see only their product news.
• Google+ blog: Google also writes about the improvements and changes they make to Google+ on their Google+ blog, though they seem to have less frequent updates.

How to stay up to date in 10 minutes a day

This trick is a bit old school, but simple and straightforward. Star the sites that you are interested in with a bookmark in your browser, and organize them into a folder.

Then each day, start your news reading by going to your bookmarks, right-clicking the folder, and opening all the sites at once. It’ll look like this:

You don’t have to read all the news. But keep an eye out for headlines that hint something interesting or relevant to you and only dive into those pieces of news.

If you like getting news from reading news sites or blogs

Yay! We have the same preference. High five!

What I like about reading blogs and news sites like TechCrunch, which are secondary news sources, is that the writers often add their personal opinions to the news story. They share insights such as how to use the new feature, whether there are any secret easter eggs or use cases, and what impact the new feature has on users.

Here are my six favorite social media news sites and blogs:

• TechCrunch Social: TechCrunch tends to publish breaking news about social products before most other publications and provide a deep analysis in their report.
• Social Media Examiner News: Every Friday, Grace Duffy of Social Media Examiner rounds up top social media news and provides a short summary of each piece of news.
• WeRSM: WeRSM covers news on all well-known social media platforms from Facebook to WhatsApp to Tumblr and more. There’s also a breaking news section on the site.
• The Next Web Social Media: The Next Web publishes a mix of social media news, trends, and interesting stories on social media.
• Social Media Today: Besides marketing tips, Social Media Today has quite an extensive coverage on social media news.
• Jon Loomer: Jon Loomer writes about advanced Facebook marketing and advertising tips. While his blog might not be a news site, he often shares how to use the latest Facebook ads features once the features are available to most people.

How to stay up to date in 10 minutes a day

The fastest way, I’ve found, to stay on top of these news sites and blogs is to use Feedly, an awesome RSS reader. To make things easier for you, I’ve set up a shared collection of the sites mentioned above in Feedly. You can follow the collection here to add all those sites into your Feedly reader.

To make scanning for top news easier, I like to set to “Title-Only View” and “Popular + Latest”.

From there, you can scan the headlines for interesting news. Feedly provides a metric for how popular an article is, compared with the other articles on the same site. If an article is several times more popular, there’ll be an orange number on the left of the headline. You could use this number to spot popular social media news.

Feedly also has iOS and Android mobile apps so that you can catch up on social media news on the go.

If you like getting news from social media

The best thing about getting news on social media is that you could get information about new features that are still being tested and available only to a few people.

Most people with such exclusive information would often tweet about it, making Twitter the best platform for getting breaking social media news.

Here’re some amazing people and accounts that share helpful or breaking social media news:

• Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra): Matt Navarra is the Director of Social Media for The Next Web, and he often tweets about new or beta features on the major social media platforms.
• Josh Constine (@JoshConstine): Josh Constine is the Editor-At-Large at TechCrunch where he writes in-depth analysis of social products and their new features and tweets about them.
• Jon Loomer (@jonloomer): Jon Loomer writes a blog for advanced Facebook marketers and regularly tweets Facebook and Instagram news.
• Ryan Hoover (@rrhoover): Ryan Hoover, as the Founder of Product Hunt, is always on top of new products and features. While he tweets about all sorts of products, he is a great source for new social media products or features.
• Mari Smith (Facebook Page): Mari Smith, perhaps the most well-known Facebook marketer, often gets early access to new Facebook features, which she shares with her fans.
• Official Twitter accounts of social media platforms (@facebook or its Facebook Page, @instagram or @instagramforbusiness on Instagram, @Snapchat, @pinterestforbiz, and @LinkedIn): While all of them post a mix of news and tips, they are a great source for updates on their platform.

I’m sure I’m missing many great people in this list. Who do you follow for social media news, especially for Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+? It’ll be great to hear from you in the comments.

How to stay up to date in 10 minutes a day

A fast way to keep up with social media news from the accounts mentioned above is to use a Twitter list. For your convenience, I’ve added those Twitter accounts into this list: Social Media News.

If you want to keep up with several Twitter lists quickly, TweetDeck is a great tool for that. Every morning (or whenever you want to check for social media news), open TweetDeck and scroll through your Twitter lists.

If you like getting news as emails

I imagine you like to check your inbox in the morning and catch up on all the things before you start work? Sometimes, I’m like that, too!

A trick to quickly catch up on social media news through emails is to subscribe to top social media news newsletters.

The advantage of subscribing to newsletters is that the creators of the newsletters often do the job of reading many social media news for you and send you the top few they think you should know.

Here are some social media news newsletters that you can subscribe to:

• Social Media Current: Social Media Current is daily (or weekly if you prefer) newsletter of the top social media news curated by a team of editors.
• TechCrunch Social Media Week In Review: This weekly newsletter is delivered every Sunday and contains the top seven to 10 social media stories of the week.
• SmartBrief on Social Business: Editors at SmartBrief go through thousands of publications and blogs every day to find the most important news. In this newsletter, they cover a range of social media marketing news, including a section on platform news.
• Nuzzel: Nuzzel is a unique newsletter. It scans through the things your friends shared on Facebook and Twitter and emails you the top three stories. A hack we do is to create a fake Twitter account, follow just the accounts that we want to monitor (such as accounts in our Social Media News Twitter list), then connect Nuzzel to this account. This way Nuzzel will recommend stories only from those accounts. Top social media news from social media in your inbox!

How to stay up to date in 10 minutes a day

Most social media news newsletters already do a great job in curating the top news for you so that you can quickly go through them within 10 minutes.

If you want to go a step further (and if you are comfortable with having your purchase data collected and used anonymously), Unroll.me is a free email tool that allows you to combine your favorite email subscriptions into a single daily digest.

If you like getting news from listening to podcasts or shows

From my research, there don’t seem to be many social media podcasts or shows that mainly discuss the latest social media news.

The best I found is the Social Media Marketing Talk Show by Social Media Examiner. It is a weekly live video talk show where the Social Media Examiner team and guest experts discuss the latest social media news from the past week. The talk shows are usually about an hour long (or about 10-ish minutes a day for five days ).

(Shameless plug alert! In our weekly The Science of Social Media podcast, we sometimes also discuss the latest social media news and trends in our mini-episodes that are about 10-minute long.)

Do you know of any podcasts or shows that also cover breaking social media news? If you could share them in the comments section below, that’ll be great!

How to stay up to date in 10 minutes a day

The Social Media Marketing Talk Shows are recorded, and you can catch the replays here. You could either watch about 10 minutes of the show every day or save up your daily 10 minutes from Mondays to Thursdays and spend about an hour watching the show live on Fridays.

One great thing about watching the recordings is that you can speed up the video. The option is at the lower-right corner of the video player.

How have you been keeping up with social media news?

With the social media landscape evolving so quickly, there are a lot of new features and trends to keep up with. But in just 10 minutes a day, you can stay on top of all the social media news.

How have you been keeping up with social media news? We would love to hear your strategies and tips!

Thank How to Keep Up With Social Media News in Just 10 Minutes a Day for first publishing this post.

Awareness to Sales: Building a Social Media PRISM Funnel That Converts – Ian Cleary [SSM051]

Is social media best used for sales or for brand awareness and engagement?

The age-old question that marketers have been debating even before Mark Zuckerberg started TheFacebook in his tiny Harvard dorm room back in 2004.

So what’s the right answer? Is there one? Many marketers lean towards the side of brand awareness and engagement, while others can’t quite see the point of social media unless it’s eventually leading to sales. But what if we could mesh the two and build a system that looks at social media as one continual, relationship-building process that eventually turns fans and followers into customers and evangelists?

Ian Cleary, Founder of RazorSocial, online marketer, Forbes contributor, and kick boxer, shares his insights into how we can do just that. As marketers, we can benefit from beginning to look at social media as one fluid process instead of segmented, unrelated puzzle pieces. The process? Ian Cleary’s PRISM funnel.

A huge thank you to Ian Cleary for packing episode #51 of The Science of Social Media full of inspiration and actionable takeaways for marketers looking to build a social media sales PRISM funnel that works. (Part of our brand new podcast series!)

How to listen: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS

This episode is available on:

• iTunes
• Google Play
• Stitcher
• Sound Cloud

In this episode, here’s what you’ll learn:

Ian Cleary shares insights into his unique social media PRISM funnel – giving marketers a great model for understanding how to connect social media to the bottom line. You’ll also learn other useful things like:

• The importance of an editorial process
• Automation tools that help to find great content
• Why both awareness and sales are an important part of social media
• How relationship building is time well-spent on social
• B2B marketing tactics on LinkedIn

The PRISM Funnel by Ian Cleary

PRISM Funnel Overview (Source):

• P for People – You build an audience of people interested in your products and services (followers/fans).
• R for Relationships – If you have a relationship with your audience, they are more likely to take action. Valuable content is a great way of building an engaged audience.
• I for Inbound Traffic – When you share out your content (e.g. blog posts) on social media to an engaged following, you get traffic to your site.
• S for subscribers and social retargeting – Most people arriving on your site won’t buy your products or services immediately, so you need to capture their details. You can do this by building email subscribers or retargeting them with ads if they don’t subscribe.
• M for Monetization – You then build a sales funnel to monetize the traffic.

A Great Moment

“Forget about social media in the short-term of building fans and followers. Think about social media as a directory where you get access to hundreds of millions of people and details”

– Ian Cleary

Awesome People and Stuff Mentioned in the Show

• Ian Cleary on Twitter
• RazorSocial Home
• Monetize Your Online Presence with the PRISM Funnel –Razor Social Blog
• How to Build a Content Conversion Funnel – RazorSocial Blog
• 101 Marketing Technology Tools and Tips for 2017 – RazorSocial Blog
• The Delightfully Short Guide to Social Media ROI – Buffer Blog
• Social Media ROI: How to Connect Social to Real Results – Buffer Podcast

Favorite Quotes

• It doesn’t matter if you’re a team of one or a ten-person team, you do need to have some sort of editorial process at the top of your social media funnel.
• I say to people that, “How can I help?” is a mindset, you don’t have to actually say it.
• Is social media all about awareness? Not if you’re using it for direct outreach. That’s straight into generating leads, partnerships and business.
• You need to have your eyes and ears open all of the time for new and exciting content to share with your audience. Inspiration can strike anywhere.
• Your audience (should) be naturally growing if you’re sharing good and relevant content on a consistent basis. That is why I always look to my follower growth metrics as a sign of the overall health of my social media accounts.
• If I want to build a real relationship with someone on social media it’s not going to happen after one Tweet, one share, or even one phone call. It happens over a period of time, even months, to get to a point where the relationship is fruitful.

How to Say Hello to Ian (and us)

Ian Cleary is an absolute whiz to follow on social media. He always keeps the Buffer team updated with the latest in social media marketing and tech. And he’d love to say hello and connect with you, too! You can find Ian on Twitter here and if you’re interested in checking out more of Ian’s work (or anything else), head on over to www.razorsocial.com.

Thanks for listening! We’d love to connect with you at @buffer on Twitter or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

—

About the Show

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 10,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

Thank Awareness to Sales: Building a Social Media PRISM Funnel That Converts – Ian Cleary [SSM051] for first publishing this post.

We Made These 10 Social Media Mistakes so You Don’t Have To

This might sound contradicting — and it’s scary for us to admit.

But, despite building a product that helps people succeed on social media, we have committed a good number of social media mistakes ourselves.

Mistakes that have cost us reach and engagement, maybe even fans and customers.

Now that we have learned from many of those mistakes, I would love to share our top 10 and how you can avoid committing them yourself.

Let’s get started…

Learn from These 10 Social Media Mistakes We’ve Made

Here’s a quick overview of the social media mistakes we’ve been making until recently:

1. Focusing on quantity over quality
2. Being on all social media platforms
3. Posting the same content across platforms
4. Using only landscape images and videos
5. Sharing only our own content
6. Not curating user-generated content
7. Not uploading videos to social media platforms
8. Not targeting specific audience for our content
9. Not boosting the right posts
10. Not replying to questions on social (fast enough)

Mistake 1: Focusing on quantity over quality

Posting less 3X our reach and engagement

We were posting way too much.

Just last year, we were posting four to five times to our Facebook Page and tweeting up to 14 times per day.

As we have been producing a lot of content on our blogs and podcast, we had many things to share. So we shared — a lot. Also, to fill our Buffer queue, we might have included content which was good, but perhaps not the best.

When we posted less (once or twice per day) to our Facebook Page, our reach and engagement increased by three-fold.

Limiting our Facebook posts to just one or two per day forced us to share only the best content. These quality posts resonated with our Facebook fans, and the Facebook algorithm surfaced them to more people.

Small business owners and solo social media managers usually don’t have the time to create or find enough high-quality content to post five times a day on Facebook or tweet 10 times a day on Twitter. By reducing the number of times you post each day, you can focus on the quality of the posts rather than the quality of posts.

Mistake 2: Being on all social media platforms

Fewer channels, more focus, better content

As a social media management company, we feel a duty to test out all social media platforms so that we can understand how each platform works and can share what we’ve learned about succeeding on each platform…

…what we’ve not been so great at is deciding when to stop using a certain platform.

Only after we took a break from Snapchat and after Instagram introduced similar Stories features, we gradually stopped posting to Snapchat and focused on Instagram.

We weren’t getting the results we want for the time and effort we put into Snapchat and most of the users on Snapchat aren’t our target audience. Whereas Instagram provides several advantages such as better discoverability, analytics (including audience insights), and audience targeting through ads.

Every additional platform your business is active on means additional time and effort required to create great tailored content for that platform and engage with your fans on that platform.

Take stock of your social media profiles and consider which channels are performing for your business and which are not. By moving away from social media platforms that might not suit your business or not be performing well, you can double down on those that are.

Mistake 3: Posting the same content across platforms

Tailored content for each platform increases reach and engagement

We often recommend people to share unique content for each of the social media platforms because the platforms are set up differently and people have different expectations for the content they want to see on each platform.

For instance, on Instagram, hashtags can help to increase your reach, but they don’t quite have the same effect on Facebook.

To help solve this problem, we recently improved our product so that you can customize your posts for each social media platform and share them to your profiles all at once.

We would love for you to give you a try if you haven’t had a chance to. Just compose a post on your Buffer dashboard or through the Buffer extension to try this new feature.

Mistake 4: Using only landscape videos and images

Square videos have higher average views and engagement

We were used to posting landscape videos and images because that was the ideal image size for most social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

1,024 pixels by 512 pixels.

But that might not be true anymore. As square videos and images are no longer cropped on Facebook and Twitter, they take up more real estate on someone’s feed — 78% more, in fact.

After spending $1,500 on experiments, we found that square videos actually generate higher average views and engagement, especially on mobile phones, than landscape videos.

Once we discovered these findings, we started posting more square videos and images on our Facebook Page and Twitter profile. It could be worth experimenting with square videos and images to see if they perform better for you, too.

Another fun experiment to explore might be posting vertical videos and images, especially since Facebook is showing a larger preview of vertical videos on its mobile feed.

Do you have any experience with vertical multimedia? How do they perform compared with landscape or square multimedia?

Mistake 5: Sharing only our own content

Curated content helped grow our Facebook fan base

We used to shy away from curated content because we thought it wouldn’t contribute to our bottom-line: traffic, signups, and revenue. It even felt counter-intuitive. Do we really want to send traffic to someone else’s website than our own?

Then, we realized that might have been a short-sighted thinking. While we were marketing to our fans, we weren’t growing our fan base much. So we were marketing to mostly the same people who could potentially be annoyed by too much Buffer content.

When we experimented with posting also content from other sources such as TechCrunch and Wired, our Page’s reach, engagement, and fans grew significantly. Five out of our recent top 10 Facebook posts are curated from others. In total, they reached over 1.7 million people, most of whom are (or were) not our Facebook Page fans. (For context, we have about 93,000 Facebook Page fans.)

Five out of our recent top 10 Facebook posts are curated from others. In total, they reached over 1.7 million people, most of whom are (or were) not our Facebook Page fans. (For context, we have about 93,000 Facebook Page fans.)

Posting quality content from others increased our brand awareness and following on Facebook. These pieces of content reached people who may not have heard of Buffer before and converted some of them into our Facebook Page fans. Now, we can share Buffer content to a bigger engaged audience.

To quickly find great relevant content on Facebook, use the Pages to Watch feature in your Facebook Page Insights. Here’s a quick video on how it works:

Mistake 6: Not curating user-generated content (UGC)

UGC grew our Instagram account by 500% within six months

We were trying many different strategies with our Instagram account when we first started it in 2013. We posted photos of our retreats and our meetups, took turns to share about our daily lives, and promoted our weekly Twitter chat, #bufferchat.

It was fun trying all those Instagram strategies, but few people were interested in the content we posted. Our Instagram account wasn’t growing much, and there were few interactions on our posts. Then, we found a strategy that grew our Instagram following by about 500 percent (4,250 to 21,000 and counting) within six months.

The strategy? Curating user-generated content.

By curating photos that our target audience is interested in (and posting a few Buffer news), we have been able to grow a large engaged following on Instagram—with whom we share social media and marketing tips through Instagram Stories and live videos.

This is the technique we use to quickly find and share UGC on our Instagram profile:

Mistake 7: Not uploading videos onto social media platforms

Native videos are shared five times more than YouTube videos on social

Quintly analyzed over six million Facebook posts and found that videos uploaded onto Facebook receive more engagement and shares than YouTube videos on Facebook.

The interaction rate for Facebook native videos were on average 109.67% higher than for YouTube videos.

…

Facebook native videos had on average a 477.76% higher share rate compared to Youtube videos.

But just a year ago, we were still sharing YouTube links to our videos rather than uploading our videos onto the social media platforms (even when we could upload videos onto Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn through Buffer ).

When we were posting YouTube links, our best video post (the one above) only reached 3,397 people. Now, videos we upload onto Facebook receive an average reach of 53,254.

Mistake 8: Not targeting specific audience for our content

Setting preferred audience made our content more relevant

Whenever we have a meetup or workshop, we used to share about the event on our Facebook Page with all our fans.

The issue was that the events are usually in a particular location while our fans are from all around the world. If you are based in London, you most likely won’t find our New York meetup relevant.

So we started using Facebook’s preferred audience feature for such localized posts. For example, when we held a workshop in Philadelphia this year, we restricted the post so that only people in Philadelphia would see it.

While it reached fewer people than most of our Facebook posts, it was highly relevant to them as they Liked our Facebook Page (indicating an interest in our content and events) and live in Philadelphia. At the same time, our fans outside of Philadelphia wouldn’t have seen this post, which was likely to be less relevant to them.

Facebook’s algorithm assigns a personalized relevancy score to every post you can see and shows you the post that is most relevant to you first. By limiting your posts only to the relevant audience, Facebook might more likely show your posts than less relevant posts from other brands, to the audience. This is especially useful for local businesses that have a local target audience.

Mistake 9: Not boosting the right posts

Top-performing posts do even better when boosted

When I first started with Facebook ads, I wasn’t sure what do to. In particular, I was boosting posts which I think might do well purely based on gut feeling. That didn’t go well.

Fortunately, I learned a great tip from Brian Peters, our Digital Marketing Strategist. The engagement rate on your existing Facebook posts gives you a good indication of how successful the post is likely to be when boosted.

Here’s how you can find the best Facebook posts to boost:

1. Go to your Facebook Page Insights’ Posts tab
2. Click on the drop-down menu in the upper left corner of the “All Posts Published” and select “Engagement Rate”

The posts you want to boost are those with above average engagement rate. For us, that’s posts with 6 percent or higher engagement rate.

You can also use this approach with Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Twitter Analytics also provides you with the engagement rate of individual tweets. For Instagram and Pinterest, you’ll need to manually calculate the engagement rates for each post (you can do this by dividing the total engagement with the reach for Instagram or the impressions for Pinterest).

This approach is great because it encourages you to create quality content that generates great reach and engagement first before spending advertising money to boost your reach. It also prevents you from becoming over-reliance on ads to get reach on social media. As Gary Vaynerchuk said, “no amount of paid media is going to turn bad creative into good content”.

Mistake 10: Not replying to questions on social

70% are more likely to use a brand’s product when the brand responds on social

Surprisingly, brands ignore 89 percent of people who want a response, according to Sprout Social’s research.

In the same research, Sprout Social found these great benefits if a brand were to respond to customers’ questions on social media:

• 70% of people are more likely to use the brand’s product or service.
• 65% of people have more brand loyalty.
• 75% of people are likely to share a good experience on their own profile.

While we reply to most questions on our social media profiles, an area we’re working on is to reply (even) faster. Jay Baer found that 42 percent of people who have reached out to a brand on social media for customer support expect a response within 60 minutes.

Using Reply (or your preferred social monitoring and engagement tools), you can quickly respond to all mentions and messages on your Twitter profile, Facebook Page, and Instagram profile from one place.

What other social media mistakes are we committing?

Those are the top 10 social media mistakes we’ve committed and the lessons we’ve learned. I hope you find them useful while planning your social media strategy.

Do you notice anything we could do better on social media? We’ll be so grateful if you could let us know!

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Image credit: Unsplash

Thank We Made These 10 Social Media Mistakes so You Don’t Have To for first publishing this post.