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Getting yourself heard on social media is getting tougher. You’ve always needed good content and the ability to work quickly to keep up a drumbeat, but now you also need good social media images to attract eyeballs in an increasingly visual world.
If you’ve read my previous blog on getting the perfect profile pic for LinkedIn, you’re obviously interested in shining on social media. Here’s another tool I recently discovered to help cut down on the time I spend posting; it’s called Landscape by Sprout Social. It allows me to efficiently crop images across many of the social media platforms with a few mouse clicks. Which is a really good thing since they are all different and keep changing their specs. Did I mention it’s free?
My partner, Andy Gryc, prefers Hootsuite as it posts to all the properties you want with one click. I admit it’s very effective, but I am fussy about my images, so I like to carefully control what’s in the frame for each platform. Hootsuite is also not free. So, I’m a Landscape fan. It takes a little more time, but having each image optimized for the different social networks and post types is well worth it IMHO. Especially with tricky images – those that have text on them or that are sized one way and need to be another (say landscape to square).
If you’ve posted an image with your online content, some properties like LinkedIn will automatically grab and resize it. If you want a different crop, you’re out of luck. If you want a different photo, you must import one. Twitter doesn’t grab a thing and needs you to feed it an image that it automatically resizes. Sigh.
Landscape resizing to the rescue
I like Landscape because it has all the social media image sizes locked and loaded. It also updates them if a network changes its image sizes. And it’s dead simple.
All you do is drag and drop your image into the application, then select the networks where you want to post it. Landscape currently supports image resizing for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube.
After you’ve selected your networks you get to choose the post type you want – such as a banner image or an in-stream wide. Landscape lets you select as many as you want so I often do a couple to see which I prefer.
You then quickly cycle through each image type, manually resizing and repositioning your image inside each frame as needed to ensure you’re not cropping out valuable content or making your image look silly.
Once you’re done creating all of your different images, you click download. And voila – you get a zip file with a bunch of perfectly sized images for each network. My example is a portrait image that I’ve turned into a landscape one. A social media engine would have likely butchered this.
I find Landscape to be extremely helpful and time saving. Free helps too. Of course, there are many great tools out there on the market; Landscape is just my new fave.
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