One of our main goals at Haiku Deck is to make things simple and easy, especially when it comes to sharing your beautiful Haiku Decks. But, the different image sizes and dimensions on various social media channels can be a bit less easy to handle. We’ve experienced just about everything from having words and images cut off in odd places, sizing of slides that don’t necessarily align with sizing on that specific social media channel, and the inability to reposition the image for a post all together. So, we’ve come up with some ways to handle situations just like this.
First, you’ll need to know how to save your Haiku Deck slides as images. Here are 2 ways:
- Take a screenshot.
- Export your Haiku Deck to PowerPoint/Keynote, then save your slides as images.
Now that you know how to save your Haiku Deck slides as images, let's get started!
When sharing a link to your Haiku Deck on Facebook, Facebook will automatically pull the image in the first slide to use for the link's preview. Sometimes, the link preview looks perfect:
And other times, when your text isn't centered on the slide, it looks like this (the majority of the text in the top of your slide gets cut off):
You probably already know that there isn't a way to reposition the image on Facebook, so here are a couple things you could do:
Showcase a different slide from your deck by using the arrows at the top left corner of the image to view the different slides in your deck and select one that looks the best.
Or, if you’d like to use the title slide, here's a workaround:
- Take a screenshot of your first slide, or export your deck to PowerPoint and save your slides as images.
- The image size for shared links on Facebook is 484 x 252. You can use photo editing software such as Photoshop, or free web based tools like PicMonkey or Canva, to upload and resize/crop the image to the correct size and save it as a .jpg or .png image file.
- Once you've saved that image, you can use the "+Upload Image" button to replace the original image with the new image you just created. It should look something like this:
Tip: If you're sharing the link and using Facebook's default link preview, you can delete the link in the status box. Your posts will look more sleek and less cluttered with text. You can also edit the text that appears in the link preview to include more details about your deck.
Google+
Similar to Facebook, Google+ will provide your link posts with a preview. Where Facebook favored the center of the image, Google+ favors the top portion of the image in the link preview (cutting off the lower portion). You still have the ability to select the slide you’d like to showcase in the preview, but, the ability to upload your own image isn’t possible.
So instead of using the link preview, we recommend uploading an image instead and including a link to your deck in the status. The recommended size for a shared image on G+ is 497 x 373, the same proportion of our Haiku Deck slides, so resizing/cropping is not needed. The result should look something like this:
Not only does sharing an image give you a beautiful G+ post, images that are shared on G+ also have a higher chance of being highlighted (taking over both columns of posts) in your followers' G+ stream.
Tip: If you're sharing a quote or blog post that doesn't have an accompanying image, you can create your own with Haiku Deck. We love doing this for our curated content; here's one example. And if you'd like to take it a step further, G+ also supports gifs. If you’ve already exported and saved your Haiku Deck slides as images, you can use GIFMaker to create a gif out of your slides, giving the illusion of a slideshow on auto play. Here's an example from one of our posts.
Because of the square format on Instagram (recommended size is 640 x 640), you’ll need to resize the image of your deck's slide into a square. To do this, you'll first want to save your Haiku Deck slide(s) as an image in a place where you can access them on your iPhone or Android phone (we like to use Dropbox and GoogleDrive for this).
Once you've saved your slide(s) as an image, you can use apps such as #SquareDroid (Android), Squaready (iPhone), or Canva (web), to upload and save your image as a square without needing to crop it when you upload it onto Instagram. You'll have an image that looks something like this:
Tip: The only place on Instagram that allows you to have a clickable link is in your bio. If you're promoting a new deck or blog post, share an attention-grabbing image, update your bio with the link to your new deck or blog post, and mention in the description of your post that they can click the link in your profile to see it.
When sharing a link to your deck on Twitter, your tweet appears in your follower's home timeline and lists like this:
Tweets like this can be easily missed by your followers, but tweeting a photo helps your tweets to stand out like this:
This is also a great way for Twitter chat hosts to highlight their questions. If you've ever participated or hosted a Twitter chat, you know how busy those streams can get. Using this method, your questions will stand out and participants are less likely to miss them; they're also easier to spot if anyone needs to scroll back through the chat's stream.
Tip: If you're using Haiku Deck to display a quote, soundbite, or question on Twitter, you'll want to insert the text more or less in the center of the slide to avoid any odd cropping.
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