Social Media Marketing for Business

As you’ve no doubt noticed, the layout for Business/Fan Pages changed around March of this year, and a majority of Fan Pages were moved to this new format in June. Since the move to the Timeline format of Fan Pages, there has been a shift in focus towards visual content.

Why this move toward visual content? Well, a HubSpot study in 2012 found that posts containing a heavy visual component received 53% more engagement over a text-only post. Jeff Bullas also has some facts and figures on the power of visual content, including that businesses utilizing visual content marketing platforms saw a 57% growth in sales. Facebook knows that visual content gets more engagement and preferences posts with imagery in the Newsfeed. To take full advantage of visual content, it helps to know the Facebook image size for each type of post and the profile header. But, Facebook changes all of the time, and it’s hard to stay on top of those changes, especially in regards to Facebook’s image sizes. While we can’t predict the future, we can give you a rundown of Facebook image size and video dimensions on your fan page and the Newsfeed, based on Facebook’s current setup. Below, we’ve given examples from our Facebook Fan Page, as well as some real, in-Newsfeed posts and ads, to give you a sense of the ideal sizes and limitations for visual content on Facebook.

Facebook Image Size Cheat Sheet

Because Facebook’s layout changes a lot over time, here is a reference to the current set up of a business fan page as of August, 2014. This is the set up that is the basis for all examples and images sizes in this article. All image sizes are listed width by height.

Cover Image

The cover image is essentially a large Hero Image for your Facebook fan page. It’s where you can show off your brand, or what your brand is all about. If this is your first time creating a fan page, just select ‘Add a Cover’ to add a cover image to your page. That being said, when you’ve selected your cover image, you’ll want to make sure you’re uploading an image of the correct size. The dimensions for a cover image are 851 px by 315 px. Of that space, about 667 px by 117 px will be unobstructed by elements such as the company name and profile picture. Facebook’s cover image advice? “To get the fastest load times for your Page, upload an sRGB JPG file that’s 851 pixels wide, 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes. For images with your logo or text-based content, you may get a higher quality result by using a PNG file.”

Profile Picture

Profile pictures are vital to the design of a fan page, because it establishes (or reinforces) brand recognition. The best thing you can do for the design of your Facebook fan page is to upload a high quality version of your brand’s logo as the profile picture. The image size to upload for this picture must be 180×180, though it displays at 160×160. This gives you a bit of room to adjust in the thumbnail image, as well as how the logo displays on Facebook.

App Icons

For most of the apps you connect to your fan page, you should have the ability to customize the thumbnail image that is displayed along with the app title. This is not true of Facebook apps, like Notes or Videos, but is true of any pages you add from apps like Heyo. The exact size of these thumbnails is 111×74 pixels.

Link Share Posts

Brooks shared the size of the Link Share post in his article about crafting the perfect Facebook post. As a reminder, the image associated with your link share will display at 484×252 pixels.

Photo Posts

Photo Posts are a bit of an anomaly in terms of image dimensions. These photos have a 504px fixed width, but the height varies based on the image. It is recommended to upload images at 1200×1200 pixels for the best display, but on your Timeline and in fan’s Newsfeeds, the image will be cropped to a 504px width. Event Posts and Pages When creating events for your fan page, it’s important to note the size of images in the Event share post and the cover image on the Event page. The image on the Event Share post is 470×174 pixels. Don’t use the same dimensions for the Cover Photo on your fan page as the size for Event Covers. The cover for Event Pages is actually 784×295 pixels.

Video Share Posts

When you post a video to your page, you will post something akin to a Link Share post. When you upload a picture directly to Facebook, the video will display in the post at 504×283 pixels.

A video posted by the William Shakespeare Interest page, as seen from the Newsfeed.

It is important to note that this example is not an autoplay video, but that the image size should be the same for both forms of video.

Sidebar Roundup

For the most part, up until recently, all of the ads in Facebook’s right hand sidebar had images that were 100×72 pixels. These ads still exist on most pages, but more recently, larger ads have made an appearance in the sidebar.

The smaller sidebar ad.

A larger sidebar ad, as seen from the Newsfeed.

The size of the larger sidebar ads is approximately 350×125 pixels.

Mobile Images

The display images on Facebook’s mobile app are slightly different than their desktop counterparts. I would recommend using the sizes for the desktop version of Facebook as guidelines for image uploads, but, for reference, here are the sizes for mobile images:

How do you use images on Facebook? Let us know in the comments below!

Meet Emily Goodrich

Emily Goodrich is a Technical Writer at Heyo. She is a Senior studying Creative and Professional Writing at Virginia Tech.