Social Media Icons for Email Signatures

1. Use an email signature generator: When you use a tool (like Signature.email) you are able to go to a website where you enter the personal details for your signature, along with your company logo or other elements you might want to add. Then you can often add links to your social media profiles which show up as social media email icons. Once you are finished you will be able to copy and paste the signature into your email client.
2. Use the basic editor in your email client: Email programs like Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and others will often allow you to do simple rich text editing in the signature area of the application. Many of them will allow you to select an image which is downloaded to your computer and add it to the signature. This can work well, but may embed the image in the email causing your email recipients to have attachments in every email you send.
3. Use HTML code: If you are a smarty pants and want to use html code that is always a possibility. Remember to include the width and the height attribute on every image because email clients are particular about images and will often stretch and ruin them. Read more in our html email guide.

If you want to get them directly from the source, usually searching on the internet for "Facebook Brand Guidelines" or whichever social platform you are looking for will land you on a page where you can download high quality logos for their website. That said, you may need graphics software to use these files as they may be high quality or in vector format.

There are also popular icon download websites like FlatIcon that would also have many of these icons available in web-ready formats such as PNG or SVG.

Otherwise the list in this article is a great starting point where you can download the zip folder of all of the social media icons for an email signature, or download just a few that you need. These icons are perfectly sized for use in your email signature.

1. Open the Outlook application on your desktop, choose New Email.
2. With the blank email message open, choose Insert.
3. Within the Insert menu you can now click on Signature and then Signatures.
4. Choose the Signature you want to edit and add a line or click inside the signature to choose where you want the icon to be added
5. In the formatting menu above the signature click on the button with a photo of mountains with a small computer in front of it, this is the Insert Picture button.
6. Find the social media icon among your computer files and click Insert.
7. Once the image is added you can click on the image to edit it and drag the corners of it to resize it.
8. To add a link to your social media profile, you will want to click the icon, and then hit the chain button to add a hyperlink to the site.

View additional Outlook image instructions with screenshots

1. Open the Gmail website. In the top right, click the Gear icon.
2. This will launch the Quick Settings menu, click the See all settings button.
3. In the General tab scroll down until you see the Signature section.
4. Add a line or click inside the signature to choose where you want the image to be added.
5. In the formatting menu below, click on the icon that looks like a box with mountains. This is the Insert Image button.
6. Choose the social media icon from your computer, choose Upload.
7. To add a link to your social media profile, drag to select the icon, and then hit the chain icon to add a hyperlink to the site.

View additional Gmail image instructions with screenshots

1. Open the Mail app on your Mac, from the top left system menu choose Mail > Preferences.
2. When the preferences window is open, look for the tabs along the top and click Signatures.
3. Choose an existing signature you want to add to, or click the Plus button below the middle column to create a new one.
4. Add a line in your signature to create a opening where you want the socia media icon to be added.
5. Drag the icon from the finder into the signature editor window where you made room for it.
6. That's it! You added your image, you can close the signature editor and test it out.

View additional Apple mail image instructions with screenshots

Typically social media icons are added to an email signature as an image that links to their own or their companies profile page on that social media channel. For example when someone clicks on the "f" icon for Facebook in your signature, they should land on your Facebook profile that contains your details, posts, pictures, and shared articles. These presenses on the web are one of your marketing channels that you can use to your advantage, and your employee's email signatures are a great way to get your clients looking at them.

If this is all pretty new, then it might be helpful to read our guide on how to create an email signature. In that article we talk about what to include, what not to include, and an in dept look on how to create an email signature.

The largest question to answer when determining which social media channels to promote in your email signature is to ask which ones you or your company are most active on. If you never plan to post to a particular social channel again then there is no reason to include it in your email signature. Consider quality over quantity here. You don’t get an award for how many social media channels or pages you are on, only if they are useful to your audience.

Many companies like to have a basic social presence on the most popular social channels:

1. Facebook - Even though this is primarily considered a highly “personal” social channel, it is becoming more popular for businesses to have a presence and post on it. There are many people on Facebook that engage with brand related content every day.
2. Twitter - Short and sweet, this social network is great for getting to know the personality of your brand.
3. LinkedIn - Known for being the professional business network, this is an important one to represent your company. It can often be the place where people look first for basic information about your company and browse through some of your employees if they are interested.
4. Instagram - Instagram is great if you have visual things to show. Brands who do well are giving their customers what they are looking for. Have your customers send in their photos of them using your product and ask their permission to post it here!
5. YouTube - Many companies don’t use YouTube as much as a social media channel, but rather a repository of videos about their company, their products, and their content. It may include “how to’s” and other helpful content for your customers to use in a self-serve manner.
6. Pinterest - If your audience includes more women than men, Pinterest can be a great place to start. This platform excels if you have something “collectible” for people. Recipes, fashions, inspiration, step by step tutorials, anything of that nature.

There are many more of them and often they change based on the industries and interests of your customers. Feel free to include others that you are active on! That said, we try to recommend linking to 2-5 of your social media profiles. Any more is overwhelming and any less can look funny with a single icon being used. (Consider one of our buttons instead for a single social icon).

It's important to balance your signature by adding the right size of social media icons. You don't want to overwhelm your logo or other important elements like your name or contact details. For most signatures I recommend adding as small as social media email icons as possible. Its nice that they are there, but they are not the most important content in the signature. Keep them small and unobtrusive if possible. Situations where you might want larger icons might include if your signature and logo are already large enough in proportion to support larger social icons, or if your job/company is primarily about social media then it may make sense! The three sizes used in our generator include:

• Small: 22px by 22px
• Medium: 32px by 32px
• Large: 42px by 42px

The most common that we have seen is that the social media icons in an email signature link to the business account. This is because these accounts are branded for the company and are usually managed by a trusted person who understands that what they post is representing the company. This allows your clients & customers to follow the account and get updates on what is happening at the company.

Linking to employee's accounts may be more tricky because they are unfiltered and anything can be posted to these accounts. The employee may not always be thinking about representing their company with what they say online. That said, linking to professional accounts like a LinkedIn profile, a portfolio, or a professional blog can be valuable uses of employee's social media when used well.

Designers will often take the social icons and change their colors to match the color of the brand they are designing for. So instead of just using blue for Facebook, red for YouTube, and cyan for Twitter, they will make them all match to the “brand orange” that matches your companies’ colors. This is a nice effect and can be used to keep social icons from distracting from your logo or other brand elements because of their colors.

Designers will often do this in a program like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, or Sketch. If you don’t have one of those programs there are some free alternatives available like Gimp and Inkscape. Otherwise the Signature.email editor has the ability for paid accounts to choose both a background color as well as an icon color and match them to your brand colors with a few clicks. Its one of the things that sets our service apart from all of the others!

The most common shape you will see out there is probably the traditional circle for social media icons. That said, squares and rounded corner squares are common as well. There really isn’t any reason to any shape other than your preference and matching your brand styles. You will find that most people just go with their gut and choose the style they like the most. Signature.email’s paid account also allows for some unconventional styles like Hexagons and circles with outlines.