How to turn a customer review into an Instagram post

Which size to use

Instagram's help page on image resolution gives the rule. A photo between 320 and 1080 pixels wide stays at its own resolution, as long as its shape is somewhere between 1.91:1 (wide) and 3:4 (tall). A narrower photo is enlarged to 320 pixels wide, a wider one is shrunk to 1080, and a shape outside that range gets cropped.

For a review, that leaves you a few safe choices:

• 1080×1080, a square. It works everywhere and is the easiest to design, because a short review sits naturally in the middle.
• 1080×1350, a 4:5 portrait. It takes more of the screen in the feed, which helps when the review runs to four or five lines.
• 1080×1440, the tallest shape Instagram keeps uncropped (3:4).
• 1080×1920 for a story, which is 9:16, the full phone screen.

Stories need a margin. Meta's guide for story ads asks you to keep about 14% at the top, 35% at the bottom and 6% on each side free of text, so the profile icon and buttons do not cover it. On a 1080×1920 image that means keeping the review between roughly 270 and 1250 pixels from the top. The guide is written for ads, but it is a safe margin for any story.

What to put on the image

Less than you think. A review post works when someone scrolling can read it in a couple of seconds. Pick a review that is short already, rather than cutting a long one down.

On the image, put the stars, the review in the customer's words, and their name in the form they agreed to: often a first name and an initial, such as "Megan R.". Add your business name or logo so the post still makes sense when it is shared on its own. If the review is about one product, name the product.

Leave the rest for the caption. Put the full review there if the image shows only part of it, and say where it was first posted. If the customer has an Instagram account and said you could, tag them there too.

Keep their email address, order number, surname and photo off the image unless they told you that is fine.

Ask the reviewer first

A customer who left a review on your website or a review site wrote it for that page. Putting it on Instagram puts their name in front of a different audience, often next to your ads. If someone would rather not be there, you want to hear it before you post, not after.

A short message is enough:

Hi Megan, thank you for the review of the birthday cake. Could we share it on our Instagram, with your name as "Megan R."? If you would rather we did not, no problem at all.

Keep the reply. If you collect reviews with your own form, you can also add a checkbox such as "You may share this review on our social media" and only post reviews where it was ticked.

In the US, the FTC's Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) cover how businesses use reviews in advertising. They are mainly about honesty, which the next section covers. This article is not legal advice. If you run paid ads with reviews, or sell in a country with its own rules, check with someone who knows them.

Credit them and keep their words

Once you put a review in quotation marks, readers take it as the customer's exact words. The FTC Guides say the same in 255.1(b): you need not quote word for word unless you present the text as the endorser's exact words, as quotation marks do. They also say an endorsement may not be "presented out of context or reworded so as to distort" the customer's opinion.

In practice:

• Do not fix their grammar or swap in nicer words. "Arrived on time and looked like the photo" stays that way.
• If you must shorten, cut whole sentences, mark the cut with "…", and make sure what is left means what the full review meant. "Great cake, but delivery was two hours late" cannot become "Great cake".
• Do not pick only five-star reviews and present them as typical if your average is lower. Section 255.2(d) warns against organising or publishing reviews in a way that distorts what customers think.
• If the customer got something for the review, such as a discount code, say so in the caption. Section 255.5 asks you to disclose a connection the audience would not expect.

Credit goes on the image or in the first line of the caption: the name they agreed to, and where the review came from.

Make the image in a minute with Formgong

If you collect reviews with Formgong, every approved review can become an image without opening a design tool:

1. Open Dashboard → Reviews and pick your site.
2. Go to the Share tab. Under Social media cards, pick one of your 8 newest approved reviews.
3. Pick a size: Instagram 1:1, Instagram 4:5 or Instagram Story. LinkedIn and X sizes are there too. The card appears on the page.
4. Press Download PNG, post it from your phone, and put the credit and the full review in the caption.

Here is exactly what the card holds. The three Instagram sizes are 1080×1080, 1080×1350 and 1080×1920, so Instagram keeps them at full resolution without cropping. The background is a gradient of your brand colour, taken from your site's brand or, if the site has none, from Settings → Brand kit; with neither, it is Formgong blue. If the review has a photo, the square, 4:5 and story cards use its first photo as the background instead, darkened a little, with the card at the bottom.

At the top sits your logo, or your store name when there is no logo. Under it is a white card with rounded corners and a soft shadow. Inside the card are five stars, gold for the rating and light grey for the rest, a large quote mark in a tint of your brand colour, the review, and the reviewer's name next to a circle with their first initial. The review takes the biggest type that fits, so a short review is large and a longer one gets smaller. With a very light brand colour, the store name turns dark and the quote mark takes a deeper shade, so both stay readable.

The card is drawn in your browser with the dashboard's own font, so accented names like Zoë Müller, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic come out as the customer wrote them, and Hebrew and Arabic reviews are aligned to the right. On the free plan a small formgong.com sits under the card; Pro and Business cards leave it off.

The card uses the review as the customer wrote it, not a translation, and only reviews collected on your site or imported from your old review app are offered.

What the card will not do

The card is quick on purpose, and that comes with limits worth knowing before you rely on it.

• Long reviews get cut. If a review does not fit even at the smallest type, the card cuts it at a word and ends it with "…". Read the card before you post it: what is left must still mean what the whole review meant, as the previous section explains. Put the full text in the caption.
• One layout. The colour and logo come from your brand settings, and the layout and font are fixed. You cannot move things around or pick a different style on the card itself.
• The logo needs the right server. Your logo only appears when the server it is stored on lets other sites load it (CORS). Otherwise the card shows your store name instead.
• The name as they typed it. The card prints the name from the review and cannot shorten it to an initial.
• One photo, no video. Only the review's first photo is used, as the background of the square, 4:5 and story cards. A video the customer attached is not on the card.
• A smaller story margin than Meta's ad guide. The story card keeps the top and bottom 11% empty. That is enough for an ordinary story, but Meta asks story ads to keep 35% at the bottom clear, so for an ad the reviewer's name may sit where the button goes.

If you need your brand fonts or a layout of your own, a review-to-image tool with a design editor will serve you better.

Review-to-image tools compared

Two of the four other tools say outright that their free plan includes review images: Senja's help centre says the feature is on every plan, Free included, and Trustindex ticks "Review images for social sharing" in its Free package. Shapo's help guide gives the clearest Instagram sizes, a 1:1 square and a 9:16 story. Of the four guides we read, only EmbedSocial's mentions consent, calling it "good practice" when a post shows identifiable details, and it is also the only one that invites you to edit the review text.

Did you post one?

If you turned a review into a post and it did well, or a customer said no and told you why, write to support@formgong.com. We read every message, and we would like to know what to change on the card first.

What Formgong Reviews includes for free

• Unlimited review sites and reviews. Text, photo, video and voice reviews on Free.
• A widget with no view limit. The review widget, carousel, badge and stars in product lists load as often as your pages do.
• Review emails in your store's name. Sent after each order with your logo and colours, replies to you, no email service to set up; buyers can rate inside Gmail without leaving the email, and get one reminder (how it works).
• Bring your old reviews. Import from Judge.me, Yotpo, Loox, Shopify Product Reviews, WooCommerce, Etsy or a CSV.
• You decide what shows. Approve each review or choose a publishing mode, reply in public or in private, and let shoppers ask the author a question.
• Google. A Merchant Center review feed, and product rating markup through the WordPress plugin.
• Reviews from your form. People who filled in your contact form can get a review request automatically.
• One account for the rest. Contact forms with Telegram and Google Sheets, an AI help chat, and free website templates.