It’s tough to find a site on the web today that doesn’t include Facebook, Twitter, and other social media logos in its design. You probably want to include them on your own site, but where do you find the actual icons? And are there rules for how to use them?

How many times do you think that you see the facebook logo every day not just on the web but on television billboards, pizza boxes same with the Twitter logo or Tumblr or Pinterest?

Social media logos are everywhere and for good reason, users know what they mean and what to expect when they see them or click on them and on the web social media icons are a great way to direct your users to your social media profiles all well using minimal screen real estate but…

When you’re designing your site where are you actually getting those icons from, it’s simple enough to go to Google Images and find some.

There are lots of different ones there but which ones do you pick, not all of them look the same. Does it matter which ones you use?

A hundred percent yes, it does matter every social media site has their own brand guidelines that it’s your job to follow.

That Facebook logo that’s a trademarked property that belongs to Facebook, you are legally allowed to use it on your site but only if you follow their rules.

Finding a social media company’s brand guidelines is easy, just Google Facebook or twitter or whatever logo you’re looking for plus the words brand guidelines. At or near the top of the search results is going to be just what you’re looking for you, just need to make sure you’re going to an official website if it’s a Twitter logo you’re looking for make sure you’re looking at the brand guideline page on twitter.com.

Don’t get all your information about social media logs from blog posts, they might go out of date quickly.

Facebook and Twitter and all these other companies are going to keep their brand guidelines page up-to-date so you always have the latest and greatest logo to work with each site is going to have these logos in different file formats for you to download and use but they’re also going to have guidelines that you have to follow.

Twitter, for example, wants you to make sure that their logo always has the bird facing to the right and they also require a certain amount of space around the logo if you don’t follow the brand guidelines of the site whose logo you’re using you don’t have their permission to be using in the first place.

Make a point to check the brand guidelines a couple of times every year or whenever you make design changes to your site.

If the logo gets updates and you’re still sticking with an older version it’s going to make you look behind the times and that is never a good thing on the web so take a few minutes look at the icons you’re using on your site then check those branding guidelines and make sure that you’re up to date.