This article was originally posted on hubspot.com by Anum Hussain.

The rapidly growing user bases of photo-centric sites like Instagram and Pinterest, and the recent image-focused redesign of Facebook’s News Feed are two of many indicators that visual content is a force to be reckoned with in marketing.

According to 3M Corporation, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. And on Facebook alone, our own research shows thatphotos generate 53% more likes than the average post.

Recent trends and studies are clearly highlighting a new wave of visual content consumption patterns. Even if you’ve never designed anything before, or never even dreamed of being a designer, in order to succeed in today’s marketing world, you need to create visual content. And not having enough budget is no longer an excuse either, as improved technology and access to tools and software has made it more and more possible for mere marketing mortals to work on their design chops.

To help you get started with visual content, this post will specifically give you a helpful cheat sheet you can bookmark and reference when creating the cover photos for your business’ various social media accounts.

The Essential Cheat Sheet for Social Media Cover Photo Dimensions

Fortunately, most social networks automatically re-size the photos you upload to your company pages. Here is a list of instances in which youdon’t have to worry about resizing images or creating visuals using a particular dimension:

• Facebook album photos
• Facebook mobile image uploads
• Facebook Timeline image uploads
• Pinterest pins
• Pinterest album covers
• Twitter photo tweets
• Google+ news feed photo uploads
• LinkedIn photo links

However, if you upload a cover photo to one of your business pages that is the incorrect dimension for that given social network, your image may get warped or cropped. This is definitely not ideal for brands looking to put their best foot forward in social media.

The following cheat sheet, created by our inbound designer Desmond Wong, will highlight the different dimensions you should be using for your various social media cover photos. And to help make things easier, we’ve also built free-to-download, pre-sized PowerPoint templates for each of the following social networks for you to use as your design canvas. Just add your creative to a social network’s corresponding slide, save it as an image file, and upload it ensure your design is optimized for that social network. Easy as pie!

You can download your free cover photo templates in PowerPoint here (template example pictured below). The download also includes our new free ebook, Design it Yourself: The Marketer’s Crash Course in Visual Content Creation, which walks you through everything you need to know to start designing visual content yourself — no previous design experience required!