Facebook’s 20 Percent Rule: Are You Following It?
Did you know that your images on Facebook cannot contain more than 20% text?
Yep.
According to the blog Inside Facebook, recently Facebook updated its advertising policy, and specifically states now that text cannot cover images for promotional content by more than 20%.
20% isn’t very much. Here is the relevant part of the new guidelines regarding copy being on photos:
D. Images
Ads and sponsored stories in News Feed may not include images comprised of more than 20% text.
According to Social Fresh, Facebook is already enforcing this new policy.
Since January 15th (the date the new policy took effect), there have been numerous reports of cover images being taken down and promoted posts being rejected based on violation of this “20 percent” rule. The issue was that while Facebook was enforcing this policy, there were no real guidelines to know whether or not your content violated the rule.
This primarily applies only to content from brands; it’s not clear if, for instance, the image I attached to this post that I will then use, of course, on Facebook to promote this post will therefore fail those guidelines. I suppose technically it would, although what I’m promoting – Babble’s content – isn’t actually featured in the image.
So, for bloggers that use images to promote content, these new guidelines don’t really clear much up.
It would only apply if you pay Facebook to promote this post. As in, you use the image and then you pay for Facebook to have it as a sponsored story or you pay Facebook to use it as an ad. Just posting an image with more than 20% text to your fan page to promote your latest post doesn’t violate anything.