It happens quite a lot on Twitter: you’ll be scrolling through your feed and there are a bunch of images. Loads of images. Some stand out more than others. This presents a problem if you are in the game of producing assets that are published to Twitter. You’ll want to produce the images that stand out, especially if you are planning on spending money promoting those images, organically or through Twitter Ads.
Creating a captivating graphic that stands out is not easy (#BreakTheInternet), and luckily for me that’s not what this post is about, but one of the easiest problems to avoid is the message of your images getting cropped because of your images dimensions. See blow:
Branding Cropped and Missing
This crop has cut the models head off
You can easily maximise the potential engagement of your Tweets, and your Tweet’s images, by ensuring all your content is visible from the feed view – because the chances someone is going to click your image is low. Like single digit percentage low. That’s low enough to assume people will probably just scroll past. What makes it worse is that in the Twitter Ads campaign creator they give minimum image dimensions of 800x320px. I understand this is the minimum, but it’s easily confused with a suggestion in my opinion. Don’t use those dimensions if you want the ideal dimensions for Twitter ads.
Uploading a 800 x 320px image will result in your image getting cropped
For illustration purposes I tweeted this really cute picture of a cat by Janya Marmeladova from 2011, see the screen grab below. It shows pretty clearly that there is some cropping happening. The slightly grey area above and below the (super-cute-don’t-get-distracted) cat is the part of the original image that doesn’t show up in the Twitter feed – it’s gets cropped. If you download the PSD template (below) you’ll see there are guides in there showing the visible area as well as a shape.
Update: When doing a promoted post with a Twitter card, the image is no longer cropped on the Twitter website. So uploading and cropping an image used as a Twitter card won’t matter. However you’ll still get cropping issues on the twitter app. See below:
What’s important to note here is that now cropping is less of an issue, it’s still not very helpful to create a regular tweet asset and a twitter card asset. So I’ve update the PSD with guides inside which will allow you to produce one asset for both Twitter cards and regular posts and cropping won’t be such an issue.
(Still) Keep in mind if you attach more than one image then this template isn’t going to be useful as the images will stack side by side.
Download the free Twitter Ad Image PSD Template!
So this is totally free. You don’t have to Tweet this, Like it on Facebook, or give me your email address. Just download and enjoy.
I am also acutely aware that I took a huge risk in using a cute cat as an example. I am glad you made it this far and didn’t get distracted by the cat. Well done.
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