Should you Post Non-Square Images?

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Should you Post Non-Square Images?

Back in August Instagram began to allow non-square images and video. If you take a photo within Instagram the photo will be square, but if you upload a photo or a video from your camera roll it can be portrait or landscape instead of square.

Yesterday I mentioned that a photo should be square. It is true that a photo can be a rectangular shape but there are a few things you need to keep in mind when posting any image to Instagram. This tip will discuss things that we will get to in later tips, and those things will get the attention they deserve later.

First, let’s talk about where people spend most of their time on Instagram. Much like Facebook’s News Feed, and Twitter’s Home Tab, people spend most of their time on their home page. This page shows them ALL (as opposed to Facebook, which doesn’t show all posts) of the accounts they follow. Besides the home page there are four other places that people spend time:

The Discover Page
Search Results
Other User’s Profiles
Individual Post Pages

This gives you a total of five total locations that people can see your post. In 3 of these locations (The discover page, the search results, and your profile page) will people see all of your posts as a square. So, even if you post beautiful wide videos, a landscape quote, or just a nice sunrise your photo will be cropped into a square.

So while it is true that you can post in other sizes the images will look weird for those places. Of the 5 locations your followers will find you are their homepage, your profile, and individual posts. The place where potential followers will find you are the discover page, the search page, and individual posts.This means that for your potential followers 2 out of 3 of the places that they will find you is not a good place for you to be posting those types of pictures, or at least pictures that don’t also look good as a square.

So, what do you do if you want to post a rectangular picture? If the image also looks good as a square then there is no problem sharing it, but if it doesn’t look good then you should take a few steps so that this picture is only seen by current followers and not by potential followers.

The way most people will likely find you for the first time is by searching a specific hashtag, so this post should probably not have the hashtags you normally use, so that their first encounter with you isn’t a weird looking image.

If you do want to use hashtags in that image you can post another image in the same day with those same hashtags, so that if someone is looking up a specific hashtag they will first see your newer post, then see the one that isn’t the first image of yours they will see. This doesn’t exactly help you because when someone is searching they may not recognize that the first post is yours, so it is likely that they won’t know that they are from the same person.

So, should you stop posting images that are not square? No, you can post things that are portrait or landscape but keep in mind, while they are okay for your current followers they may look weird for your potential followers, so do post these images, just don’t overdo it.