Social media platforms can be overwhelming. We wanted to make it a little more whelming by breaking down each of the features available on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube over seven weeks. We’ll talk format, length, location, and life span, so you can make the most out of what the social media platforms have to offer.

This week we’re talking about Instagram and Facebook posts. Each interface is a little different, but you can post to both Instagram and Facebook if your accounts are linked in the Accounts Center and from the Meta Business Suite. You can schedule your posts from the Meta Business Suite in case you go on vacation, or you want to get all your posts for the week scheduled, so you can focus on other tasks. If you don’t want to use Meta Business Suite and you’re posting the same thing to both platforms, you should create your post using Instagram and share it to Facebook.

What are posts? A post can be pictures or videos that will forever remain on your profile page. On Facebook, your photos should be 1200 pixels wide by 630 pixels tall or 1080 pixels by 1080 pixels and videos should be 1280 pixels wide by 720 pixels tall. On Instagram, the standard is 1080 by 1080 pixels, however, it will also accommodate landscape photos 1080 wide by 608 pixels tall and portrait, 1080 wide and 1350 pixels tall.

What do they do? Posts are the traditional way of sharing your content. They appear in your followers’ feeds and remain on your profile page forever. A post’s purpose is to share your brand, products, and services with your customer base. When new customers find you, they’ll probably scroll through your feed to learn more about your company. People can like, comment, and share your posts. You can add hashtags and locations to make your posts searchable to people who aren’t following you to help increase your brand awareness.

What should you post? Post about your business, updates to your hours, sales, and events. Post pictures of your products or what you have to offer. Make a short video explaining what you offer. Create graphics using Canva or Adobe Illustrator. We do recommend when creating graphics, not to put too much information on them. Try to put the most important information on your graphic but keep most of the text in your caption. Also in the caption, be sure to tag locations, businesses, and people to expand your reach.

Stay tuned for next week’s blog when we talk about Instagram and Facebook Stories!