This is test 12 of trying to find the best social media sharing image size and composition that will work for more than one social media site, a single image that will work for social sharing images on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. (Well, actually it’s about trials 12-15. I got tired of making so many posts and actually made several temporary posts and used many variations of the image below where I moved the face around.)
I need to test what happens if the eyes or face are really low or high in the photo. What kind of faces are recognized and what happens when the faces are really low or high in the photo?
I’m getting tired of doing new posts for all of these. I’m going to use a variation on the following photo for both tests and do them both in this one post, just switching them out.
The test for high will be just to confirm that Twitter and Facebook recognize the face and do smart cropping. Then I will test low face.
Results
With the high face, Twitter recognized it and smart cropped it, giving a square image of only photo.
With the low face, Twitter recognized it and smart cropped a square, but didn’t center the face, but did get some of the banner at the bottom. (Unlike when the face was high at the top.)
With the high face, Facebook recognized it and did a high crop.
With the low face, Facebook recognized it and centered on the face (unlike Twitter) which mean that there was on line of copy showing.
Conclusions:
If I end up optimizing the first line of copy since it shows on Twitter more often and Facebook occasionally, then I should be good. It was really hard to get a face this low in the photo!
Alternate option: Put the title in the center.
(To see this I had to make a temporary blog post. I was tired of putting in all the categories, etc for a blog post, but Facebook remembers the first image it posts with for a post and won’t put in a new one. And if I try to just post the image, Facebook doesn’t crop it…)