Top tips for Twitter posters – ABJ Research Poster Competition 2019
Make your design within the size limits.
The highest image size allowed by Twitter is 5MB. These are the image formats accepted by Twitter:
GIF: This is the only format out of the three that supports animation. GIFs can be up to 5MB in file size. Its low color resolution of 8 bit color makes it have a smaller file size. GIF is a great option for those who have limited color palette because it can make a large image that has a small file size.
JPG and JPEG: Image compression allows this to have small file size. The level of compression differs here and it will not be significant if it is low. This format has a slightly lower image resolution by nature. The main reason for its creation is also an advantage, and that is it has a high color resolution of 24 bit color.
PNG: It is uncompressed and has high color resolution.
Keep crops in mind.
Make sure not to leave anything attractive or crucial outside the preview window, people will probably not click on the image to view it wholly. Photos that are attached to tweets range from 440 x 220 to 1,024 x 512 (a ratio of 2:1)
There are many apps that people can use to view tweets and the preview images vary in size. Tweetdeck is one of those apps and it seems to favor preview images close to 16:9 ratio. Talon, an android app that appears to use a preview image of 3:2 ratio. All these various apps will crop differently to fit their preview window, having an optimal image shape is hard, although they have a similarity, all the apps crop away the image edges. Therefore, try as much as possible to make your recognizable image which is the one that talks more about your poster, be in the middle of the poster so that in case the edges are cropped out, your poster won’t still lose its importance. You can also think about putting your title in the middle of the poster so it can be seen easily.
Appropriate use of animation
Even though, using animation on paper can be hard. It is easy on Twitter. Animation gets your poster more engagements than still images. Although Twitter supports the use of animated GIFs, there is still a limit of file size to 5MB on mobile and 15MB on web.
Editing
Twitter was developed on its ability to be to the point, short and precise and that is why it only supports 280 characters and this includes pictures and retweets. It takes someone to be really skilled to create good tweets and especially retweets.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Am I allowed to post an already published paper?
Sure, you can. Be it journal articles, conference papers, books or book chapters.
Am I allowed to post another person’s research?
If you want to do this, know how the publisher/copyright owner of the material wants to get permission requests.
Am I allowed to post an unpublished work?
Sure, you can whether it is published or still an ongoing research if you wish.
The size or format my poster should be?
Any dimensions you want works for your poster. Just make sure people can see and understand the texts and figures very well. When we used Microsoft PowerPoint, we discovered that a text of font size between 12 and 16 was seen very well when an A4 slide was saved as JPEG and uploaded to Twitter. When you use Photoshop or CorelDraw with paper size of A0, make sure the font size of the text is between 50 and 60 to make it clear to read. Use any software you want to create the poster, just make sure the image uploaded is very clear to be read.
Try as much as possible not to use Twitter-bots as we wants all individuals involved to be active and participate freely in discussions to optimize gaining from the event.
ABJ Research Poster Competition 2019
Tweet your poster image with a title, #ABJPoster and relevant subject hashtag(s), discuss, engage, connect and showcase your research using:
