How to Boost Traffic by Creating Images for Social Media

For many bloggers, a great chunk of traffic will come through from social media. Sharing your posts to an engaged audience of followers is a great way to bring in traffic- but it’s not as simple as having a catchy blog title. Images can boost interaction and click-through on pretty much every social platform. Here’s a brief guide on how to do so on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter:

1. Twitter

I hear so often that twitter is the least visual social channel,  but I totally disagree! With only 140 characters to get your point across, I find an image allows you to really elevate your tweet and boost interaction. You could use an image to fit a little more text into your tweet, or to create a bright and eye-catching headline image.

Using images from your blog posts can work- however there is often an issue with the sizing. If your blog post image is square or long and thin, then a lot of it will get cut-off in the feed. I would advise editing one of your images specifically for twitter in order to get the best result.

Ideal Image Size for Twitter: Sizing your images to 440px by 220px will see your image fit perfectly every time!

2. Facebook

Facebook is a really visual platform, and creating an image to go with each post is a great way to increase your natural engagement. Recently, you might have noticed your organic Facebook reach dropping. In other words, it’s getting harder and harder to reach a wide audience on Facebook unless you’re able to pay for promoted posts. It’s more important than ever to really think about what you put out onto your blogs Facebook page, and how you maximise engagement for every status.

You only really need to update your Facebook page once a day, so you can really take the time to work on your image and make it stand out to your followers. Whereas on Twitter it can be useful to use the image to fit in some extra text, you can fit a lot of characters into a Facebook status so there is less pressure to get a message across in your image.

Instead, you might want to take a popular image from your blog or from Instagram and resize it for Facebook.

Ideal Image Size for Facebook: A square image works very well on Facebook visually. 500px by 500px is a size I have settled on and has been working really well

3. Pinterest

It goes without saying that it’s important to think about images when it comes to Pinterest, but there is so much you can do to make sure that your images get the maximum amount of views and engagement.

Firstly, create a pinnable title image for each blog post. For example if you’re a food blogger, don’t just pin images of your latest recipe; create an image which includes your recipe title; the title ‘How to Make the Best Mince Pies you Will Ever Taste’ over a picture of some amazing mince pies is bound to go down well!

Also, if you haven’t already I would really advise getting the ‘pin-it’ button as it makes it so easy for readers to share your posts on Pinterest.

Ideal Image Size for Pinterest: Images that are longer than they are wide are best! I find that 400px by 550px works well, but as long as it’s a rectangle than generally it’ll look great in the feed.

Do you have any image tips of your own to share, or any extra questions that you’d like answered? Let us know in the comments below!