AI Images for Social Media: Sizes, Styles and a Consistent Feed
An AI image that looks stunning on your screen can look amateur the moment it reaches social media: cropped heads, tiny text, a blurry square stretched into a story. Social platforms each crop differently, and a feed full of mismatched styles looks messy even when every single image is good. The fix is boring but effective: standard sizes, one repeatable style, and a short checklist before every post.
1. Learn the three sizes that matter
You do not need to memorise every platform specification. Three shapes cover almost everything: square for feed posts, vertical for stories and short video covers, and wide for banners and link previews. Generate or crop to those three shapes, and check the safe area, which is the central zone that survives every crop.
The most common mistake is generating a square image and letting a platform crop it into a vertical story. Faces, products and text near the edges get cut. Generate in the shape you will publish, or generate larger than you need and crop deliberately yourself. A deliberate crop always beats an automatic one.
2. Pick one style and write it down
A consistent feed comes from a written style, not from memory. Choose a colour palette of three colours, one lighting mood such as soft daylight or warm evening light, and one rendering style such as flat illustration or realistic photo. Write these into a short style line and paste it into every prompt.
The style line is the difference between a feed and a pile of images. Two images with the same style line look like they belong together even when the subjects are completely different. Our guide to a consistent brand visual style shows how to build that line, and our guide to image styles explained helps you pick a style that suits your topic.
3. Design for small screens first
Most people see your images on a phone, at thumb size, while scrolling fast. Details that look great at full size vanish at that scale. Test every image at small size before posting: shrink it to the width of two thumbs and ask whether the subject is still obvious within one second.
If the answer is no, simplify. One subject, strong contrast, and no more than five words of text on the image itself. Put the rest of the message in the caption, where it belongs. Images that work at small size also work at large size, but the reverse is rarely true.
4. Keep text off the image when you can
AI image tools still struggle with text. Long words come out misspelled, letters merge, and a perfect image gets ruined by one garbled headline. The safest rule is to keep text off generated images entirely and add it afterwards in a design app, where spelling is guaranteed and fonts are consistent.
If you must generate text inside the image, keep it to one or two short words, check the spelling at full size, and regenerate until it is correct. Never post an image with misspelled text hoping nobody will notice. People notice, and it undermines trust in everything else you post.
5. Build a batch workflow for the week
Generating one image at a time all week is slow and produces inconsistent results. Batch the work instead. Once a week, write the captions for the week, list the images you need, and generate them in one session with the same style line. Review them together, fix the weak ones while the style is fresh in your mind, and schedule the posts.
Batching also makes it easier to spot repetition. Five posts in a row with the same composition look lazy, even if each image is good. Vary the angle, the distance and the background while keeping the colours and lighting constant. That balance, varied subjects with a steady style, is what makes a feed look professional.
6. Avoid the common prompt mistakes
Three prompt mistakes ruin more social images than any other cause: asking for too many subjects at once, describing a style in vague words like beautiful or nice, and forgetting the background. One subject, a concrete style description, and a named background such as plain studio wall or busy market street will improve results immediately.
Also watch for the style drift that creeps in over weeks. Save your best prompts and reuse them, and compare new images against last month output before posting. Our guide to image prompt mistakes covers the full list, and it is worth a read before you build your weekly batch.
Bottom line: Bottom line: Generate in the shape you will publish, lock one written style, design for small screens, and batch a week of images in one session.