Images on Face­book are a superb way to con­nect to your con­sumers. Images are in the sweet spot of social con­tent; more engag­ing than text and more straight­for­ward than video. The prob­lem with images on Face­book? They are too easy to do. Every­one uses them. We’re all pub­lish­ers now and there is loads of com­pe­ti­tion. Your $2,000 image may well get ignored in favor of a pic­ture of your neighbor’s cat. It’s a chal­lenge to do images well. This post will help you mas­ter Face­book images and give your brand’s pho­tos an edge.

Image Posts vs. Articles With Thumbnails

Face­book is always exper­i­ment­ing. “Best prac­tice” is a mov­ing tar­get. There­fore pay­ing close atten­tion to updates from the plat­form and hav­ing an instinct for good con­tent mar­ket­ing are both more valu­able than approved process­es. Any strat­e­gy or rec­om­men­da­tions from before August 2014 (at the very least) are in dan­ger of being out of date.

What hap­pened in August 2014? Face­book took action against click­bait. Part of that action was to pri­or­i­tize link posts over image posts with a link in the cap­tion. Link posts now pro­duce large thumb­nails pro­vid­ed there’s an image of the right size asso­ci­at­ed with the page the link points to.

Start­ing Jan­u­ary 2015 Face­book will make fur­ther changes on what style of posts get pri­or­i­tized in the news­feed. Those changes are dis­cussed lat­er in this arti­cle.

Nei­ther of these changes mean image posts are dead. There are Pages on Face­book that have become very pop­u­lar just by curat­ing images and shar­ing them.

Brands can cer­tain­ly do sim­i­lar but most com­pa­nies will like­ly need to make link posts with images work for them. Espe­cial­ly if the goal is to gen­er­ate traf­fic or cus­tomers from Face­book and direct them to an owned media prop­er­ty.

Associating Images With Linked Articles

When you link to a web page from Face­book the plat­form will auto­mat­i­cal­ly attempt to iden­ti­fy an image and pro­duce a thumb­nail. If there is no image to be found or all the asso­ci­at­ed images are too small then there will not be a thumb­nail. This looks ter­ri­ble. An image post with a link as a cap­tion, though not nor­mal­ly rec­om­mend­ed, may be a bet­ter option.

Images that are less than 200 x 200 px or are larg­er than 5 MB might not get select­ed for thumb­nails. Face­book also some­times wres­tles with images that have an height/width aspect ratio greater than 3 (in either direc­tion) but has become much bet­ter with tow­er­ing con­tent units thanks to the info­graph­ic del­uge of 2014.

The Face­book Debug­ger Tool is a start­ing point to deter­mine whether images are caus­ing prob­lems.

If there are more than one image avail­able on the page then Face­book will let users scroll through and pick their own thumb­nail. Mar­keters can over­ride that. Mar­keters should over­ride that when it is impor­tant that the best image is picked or when Face­book needs a nudge to see the asso­ci­at­ed image.

The Open Graph fam­i­ly of meta tags are used to over­ride Facebook’s image detec­tion sys­tem. The image prop­er­ty is known as og:image. Face­book sug­gests that images ref­er­enced in this tag’s con­tent are at least 1200x630 pix­els.

Here’s an exam­ple of the og:image tag being deployed.

<meta property=“og:image” content=“http://cdn.momentology.com/wp-content/uploads/defining-affiliate-marketing-for-2015.jpg” />

The Perfect Image Size

Facebook’s doc­u­men­ta­tion says you should be at least 1,200 x 630. That’s pret­ty big.

Some blogs have an advan­tage here in that they can dis­play large images while their theme auto­mat­i­cal­ly adjusts them to fit the con­tent area. Retail­ers rarely have that option, but can make use of the og:image tag to asso­ciate a larg­er image for Face­book shar­ing than their own page dis­plays.

As it hap­pens, the min­i­mum size to qual­i­fy for a large thumb­nail, one that stretch­es across the full Face­book post area, is (cur­rent­ly) 600 x 315. If you go small­er than that and still qual­i­fy then your post link will like­ly get a small 154 x 154 or even 90 x 90 thumb­nail instead.

Face­book dis­plays thumb­nails in land­scape, at a 1.91:1 aspect ratio and crops when it needs to. Land­scape images, there­fore, are far safer than por­trait images. A thumb­nail gen­er­at­ed from a link to a page with a tall por­trait image will crop to show a strip of the image’s con­tent. The result usu­al­ly does­n’t look good.

Is there a per­fect size? I have come to pre­fer 708 x 370. Face­book will show images of this size in their entire­ty and show them clean­ly. Text on images is read­able if the font size is large enough.

Twit­ter and Google+ will also cope with images 708 x 370 nice­ly. This means you can tai­lor the very bot­tom edge of the image so that it looks like there’s more to see and a click is nec­es­sary to do so or use the pre­ci­sion to avoid crop­ping effects you don’t want.

The Perfect Color Choice

There is a psy­chol­o­gy of col­ors and it is a thorny one. In sum­ma­ry, col­ors do mat­ter, col­ors have an asso­ci­a­tion to feel­ings, and while these can some­times be broad­ly applied to con­sumers there are so many excep­tions, per­son­al choic­es and oth­er vari­able it is gen­er­al­ly impos­si­ble to get spe­cif­ic. Whit­field and Wiltshire’s Col­or psy­chol­o­gy: a crit­i­cal review is a good read.

Broad­ly speak­ing, col­ors have an influ­ence. The Impact of col­or on mar­ket­ing study revealed that up to 90 per­cent of impulse deci­sions made about prod­ucts are based on col­or alone. I’d call a Face­book click an impulse deci­sion. It depends on the prod­uct, of course.

Joe Hal­lock has pub­lished inter­est­ing research into col­or pref­er­ences. Men and women both pre­fer blue and green is fair­ly safe sec­ond choice. Equal­ly, both gen­ders dis­like orange and aren’t too keen on brown.

The dom­i­nant col­ors in your Face­book images should try and match the per­son­al­i­ty of your brand/Page. The charts above might sug­gest that brown isn’t huge­ly pop­u­lar, but if you’re engaged in con­tent mar­ket­ing to sup­port moun­tain climb­ing sup­plies then you would cer­tain­ly be using a lot of rugged brown images. Brown suits the per­son­al­i­ty of most mount­ing climb­ing brands or pages.

Even if you have a good instinct for which col­ors sup­port your brand per­son­al­i­ty the best approach is to test and learn.

Text & Image Ads

It’s worth know­ing Facebook’s rules about text on image ads. It can be frus­trat­ing if Face­book alerts you that an organ­ic post is get­ting more shares than usu­al, rec­om­mends a paid boost in order to cap­i­tal­ize on that, only for the sys­tem to then dis­al­low the boost because there’s too much text on the image.

It’s also worth know­ing about how Face­book judges text on images as the social net­work warns against images and posts that look too com­mer­cial. One sam­ple “poor post” uses an image cov­ered in text and Face­book says; “Begin­ning in Jan­u­ary 2015, peo­ple will see less of this type of con­tent in their News Feeds.”

Face­book divides images into a 5 x 5 grid. If there is a trace of text in more than six of those box­es, then the image can’t be used.

Text fea­tured in prod­uct pho­tographs in real sit­u­a­tions or even pic­tures of prod­ucts that use text are accept­able and won’t count towards your six-box lim­it. Face­book points out that images edit­ed to include text on the prod­uct as an attempt to loop­hole the pol­i­cy aren’t accept­able.

I’ve yet to try stand­ing in the back­ground of a pho­to­graph, hold­ing a sign with an adver­tis­ing state­ment on it and test­ing to see whether Face­book blocks that.

Why Does All This Matter?

I’ve lost count of the num­ber of hours I’ve spent research­ing and fine-tun­ing the size, shape, col­ors and pre­sen­ta­tion of images on Face­book. As a reminder; 708 x 370 is my favorite cur­rent size. I’ve invest­ed this time because I’ve found suc­cess makes a big dif­fer­ence. I’ve had viral can­di­date con­tent flop because the Face­book thumb­nail was rub­bish. I’ve had much weak­er con­tent go viral because the Face­book thumb­nail was strong.

At the start of this month Sim­ply Mea­sured shared research of a Q3 2014 Face­book study.

This shows that link posts get a high­er ratio of shares than pho­to posts (both dwarfed by videos). This goes some way to illus­trate that link posts with great thumb­nails are gen­er­al­ly the best bet.

Conclusion

It’s worth get­ting images right as they can have a pro­found effect on your Face­book activ­i­ty. Mas­ter­ing Face­book images isn’t easy – big brands may tie them­selves into knots (“Is it cre­ative? Is it media?”) over images and small­er brands may strug­gle to source or cre­ate them at all – but the art-sci­ence is pos­si­ble to mas­ter.

The usu­al advice applies:

• Test and learn.
• Take advice from Face­book when they offer it.
• Lis­ten to feed­back from your com­mu­ni­ty.

What else have you learned about using images to engage cus­tomers on Face­book? Share your insights in the com­ments.