First things first, social networking sites are a royal pain in the bum...

Why I hear you ask?

They're unforgiving, capricious and painfully prone to change.

What you once naively thought was best practice is all but thrown out the window after any major updates. In particular it seems that optimal image sizes are constantly changing at a thoroughly irksome rate.

Stop Bloody Changing!!!

To help combat those insidious social network cretins, I'm putting together an ULTIMATE image size cheat sheet to add to your social media arsenal. At the moment there's just sizes for the big 4 networks but we'll build and update this post so it has more.

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+
• LinkedIn

Last updated: November 2014

Twitter

Admittedly we were initially caught short when Twitter changed its layout, hence why the banner image was out of focus and looked like it was drawn with a baked potato. We've since updated our cover photo and now have a happy shiny non-pixelated monkey sitting proud in all his glory.

-Profile picture: 400 x 400

-Cover photo: 1500 x 500

-Instream images: 1024 x 285 (anything with a rough aspect ratio of 2:1 will scale nicely too)

Facebook

Facebook has a few different size requirements for you to be wary of.

Update - Facebook has started to introduce a new page layout, with surprise surprise new image dimensions. Profile and cover images are the same dimensions (although the alignment of cover photos has changed a bit), but timeline images are a wee bit bigger.

-Profile picture: 168 x 168

-Cover photo: 851 x 315

-Standard timeline image: 504 x 504

Google+

Good ol' Google+, shit for making friends, great for SEO. Here are the new and up to date image sizes for Google's forced social network

-Profile picture: 250 x 250

-Cover photo: 1240 x 700

-Feed image: 426 x 357

LinkedIn

Everyone's favorite business oriented professional networking service requires the following image sizes for company pages:

-Company name/horizontal logo: 120 x 80

-Cover Photo: 646 x 220

-Square logo: 60 x 60

Pinterest

Never underestimate the power of Pinterest. It's a bit of a funny one - while there are no specific image dimensions (as most images are automatically resized to fit the width of a 'pin') these dimensions can be used as a general guideline to make sure your images look as good as possible for maximum click-throughs.

-Profile photo: 60 x 60

-Board photo width: 216 x 146

-Full size pin: 709 x [length of image]

-Optimum pin size: 735 x 1102

Are there some image sizes you desperately need to know but aren't in this guide? Tweet us or leave a comment below and we'll do our best to find the optimum size.