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Your social media profiles should be crystal clear who owns them, and your logo is the best way to do that. Your logo serves as your calling card and the face of your company. It is what people associate with your brand. As such, you want to display it proudly with every social media post. A social media kit can help you achieve that goal.
While you do not need a dedicated social media kit for your logo, you are doing you and your company a disservice by not having one. A properly designed kit can help your social media feed logo express the trust, credibility, and authority you want regardless of the platform. It also helps improve audience engagement through perfectly-sized brand awareness and familiarity.
A proper social media kit provides clear version guidelines for each social media platform. By reading further, you will learn tips on designing and using your logo on the most popular social media platforms out there.
What is a Social Media Kit, and Why Does Your Logo Need One?
Media kits are nothing new. Companies have used marketing media kits for decades, usually as a cardboard folder mailed or hand-delivered to their marketing agents and various news sites. Social media kits just bring the practice to the digital and social media world.
Sometimes called social media style guides, social media kits establish and define the high-resolution visual representations and behaviors of your brand. Tailored to each social platform, you base your kits around your long-term goals and the metrics you need to achieve them. A logo social media kit defines how to design your logo and brand graphics for each platform and their customer base.
As such, a good logo social media kit ensures your logo fits your brand goals. It does this by ensuring your logo meets the image requirements of each social media platform.
Your customers access social media through various devices and portals of varying shapes and sizes. Your social media kit defines the proper logo alignment to ensure your logo remains clear and professional on all of them regardless of scale or resolution.
While you could theoretically ensure this compliance without a media kit, it becomes much harder to do so, especially if you outsource your logo development to a marketing agency or designer. The kit serves as your instructions and requirements for the use of your brand on your social platforms.
A properly defined logo social media kit:
- Ensures brand credibility and professionalism
- Prevents errors, fails, and awkward design moments
- Quickly onboards new employees and partners
How to Develop Your Logo Social Media Kit
Because you must modify your logo for each social platform, you want to start your media kit with a logo you can easily manipulate. Complicated graphics may look nice on paper but can look unprofessional on a mobile device.
As such, you want to store your logo files in the PNG graphics format or something similar. PNG files are easy to resize and compatible with most social platforms. You also want to do the edits on a desktop computer so you can have easy access to all your logo files during development.
You also want symbol-only versions of your logo as they work best in small spaces such as your social profile pictures. Symbols are easier to recognize in the social media space and provide a bigger brand impact for your customers.
Other things to consider:
- Include your logo somewhere in your cover photos, either as the entire image or embedded on top of another.
- Stay consistent across all social platforms by using the same logo design and color scheme.
- Test your social media logos on several devices and resolutions.
- Understand how each platform displays and uses your logo, including border style.
- Follow the graphics guidelines for each social media channel and adjust your logo accordingly.
- Ensure your logo is easy to see and recognize.
- Optimize your logo for smaller, mobile-friendly screens with contrasting colors.
- Avoid using a logo that grabs too much attention, as it will diminish your brand message.
Specific Social Media Kit Tips for Logos
You use social media to let your customers see and interact with your brand. A well-defined social media kit for your logo will go a long way towards building that community. However, to do that, your kit must define how your logo will look and interact with every social media channel your brand uses.
This means you may need a separate version of your logo for each platform. To help you out, we provided some design and valuable tips for the most popular social platforms below.
Facebook requires that your logo be no smaller than 400 pixels (px) wide and 150px tall and upload as either a PNG or Jpeg file. You can upload larger logos, but they are very strict on the file format. If you store your logo in SVG or another format, you must convert it.
Twitter requires all logos to be a 400-by-400 square pixel PNG or Jpeg image. The platform will display your logo with every post or “tweet,” which is limited to 240 characters. Therefore, you will want to ensure your logo looks correct when repeated multiple times on a single screen.
The Instagram photo and video sharing app can use your Facebook logo, but it is recommended that you use a separate file that is at least 110px by 110px but no larger than 180px by 180px. However, you must upload a jpeg file, as Instagram does not accept PNG.
LinkedIn requires that your logo be no smaller than 300px by 300px. They also only accept PNG and Jpeg images. Otherwise, you can design your logo as you would for any other B2B channel.
YouTube
The video platform has no minimum size requirements but recommends that your channel logo be larger than an 800px by 800px square. Beyond that, YouTube accepts Jpeg, Gif, BMP, and PNG image files.
Pinterest has no size requirements but recommends keeping your logo as a 165px-by-165px square PNG or Jpeg image.
Conclusion
A well-established social media kit for your logo can ensure it correctly represents your brand through all your social media channels.
If you need help designing your logo for your social media efforts, Placeit can help you define the right social media kit that will keep your brand consistent while meeting the specific requirements of each platform.
