Size matters

I don’t know about you, but I consume social media content mainly on my mobile. A quick check on the internet confirms that I am not the only one. Even if mobile phones have grown in size over the years, they are still undoubtedly much smaller than a desktop screens. This, however, seems to have escaped the attention of many content producers on social media.

I scroll past any post with an image in which I am not able to read the message quite quickly. I am not on social media to study. If you want my attention, you will have to be clear and loud. There are surprisingly many “serious” contributors who widely share images on, for instance, LinkedIn, in which the content is too tiny to be readable. I am not speaking only of texts, I also observe tables, graphs, and infographics that tell me NADA. They are dependent on being rendered in a much bigger size, to be able to convey their content. In a fast-scrolling world, we do not have time to stop to determine what they actually mean. In this context, messages need to be short and clear, both visually and verbally. A side effect of spreading unreadable messages is that you are, at the same time, spreading the fact that you, or those who create the content for you, do not know exactly what they are doing.

I suspect that many post-images are being created on big screens and the creators forget to check how they will look in mobile size. This is a bit curious because it is very simple to do so. One has to zoom out in whatever software one is using until the image gets as small as it would on mobile. No need to be percentage– or pixel-perfect. Just zoom out, and you will immediately see if what you have created will survive on a mobile screen.

Some fonts are more resilient to downsizing than others. Script fonts are very popular at the moment but tend to turn into porridge as soon as they reach a certain smallness: which they do on mobile.

Are you producing your business’ images for social media yourself, or have you outsourced it to someone? In any case, always ask this question before publishing anything: “Is this readable on mobile?”

Furthermore, your social media images should of course be visually consistent, or as we say: “On brand”. I will get back with some tips about that later. Stay tuned.