Less Restrictions on Facebook Cover Photos for Business Pages
Mar 26, 2013
Pictures being worth 1,000 words may be an understatement. The images you choose tell as much (if not more) about your company or brand as the text around them. Studies show that pages, posts, whatever that have an image in them get looked at more than double those that are just text, so attaching an image should not be an afterthought! Earlier this month Facebook released an updated version of their Business Page Guidelines from which some of the previous restrictions for Facebook cover photos has been removed.
Up until now, Facebook's policy on business page cover photos was that you could display a photo only; no contact info, pricing, specials, basically any kind of advertising messaging at all. The list of can't-dos is no longer in their recently revised guidelines, and under Section III, "Page Features - Cover" it reads this:
"All covers are public. This means that anyone who visits your Page will be able to see your cover. Covers can't be deceptive, misleading, or infringe on anyone else's copyright. You may not encourage people to upload your cover to their personal timelines. Covers may not include images with more than 20% text."
So it looks like it's ok to add a little promotional copy to your cover photo, as long as it's not overwhelmingly text. You can easily figure out about what 20% of the overall image is, by eyeballing 5 boxes across your image and estimating if your text takes up about one of those. Most likely, you won't get your page shut down if you go over a little.
Facebook Business Page Cover Photo Message Ideas
Now that your cover photo can be used more effectively than a big placeholder, you can use that space to promote your company or brand. Besides just adding your contact info or website, you could add a little "Call to Action" about a new product launch, holiday specials or coupon, or an event you have coming up. You can add a link for readers to follow in the photo caption to take them to a landing page on your website or elsewhere to learn more or sign up.
Just so you don't have to go looking for it again, the dimensions for your cover photo are 851 pixels (px) wide by 315 px tall. Your profile picture size is 160px by 160px and to prevent your message on your cover photo from getting lost behind it, make sure you don't place any text in the bottom left corner, about 190px in and 105px up. If you're using a graphics program like Photoshop, save the file so you can use it as a template for next cover photo(s).
Your cover photo is always displayed at the top of your business page on both Facebook's desktop and the mobile version, so your special message will stay at the top of your page as long as you need it to, without getting buried down your timeline. You can still change your cover photo anytime you want, and the new image and message gets shared to all your followers; so like any of your marketing content, it pays to keep it fresh!
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