Judge a brand by its cover

By Mark Frary

I wrote recently about Facebook’s new news feed which is gradually being rolled out to the network’s billion or so users.

The new changes represent both opportunity and threat to travel brands on the network, as I discussed at the time, but Facebook has been making other changes of relevance to anyone using Facebook to market their travel and tourism business or organisation.

Last month, as well as announcing newsfeed, FB made changes to the rules governing cover photos and what they could contain.

Previously, Facebook said cover photos could not include discount and pricing information, calls to action such as “Like us” or “Download this” nor contact information that should go in Facebook’s About section.

The new guidelines now state: “Cover photos can’t be deceptive, misleading, infringe on anyone else’s copyright or be in violation of the Pages Terms. You may not encourage people to upload your cover photo to their personal timelines.”

The restriction on the amount of text allowed in a cover photo - 20% of the image size - remains in place. I would argue that using such a large amount of text is probably counterproductive. News feed’s new look is all about great images so why not take advantage.

On their own, these changes are of importance but the changes to news feed also mean that cover photos are becoming more important as they will now appear more prominently (see below).

It is important to note that not all the cover photo is used but a significant chunk from the centre. The amount of space this takes up on newsfeeds, including (hopefully) friends of people who like your brand, means that sourcing a great cover photo is going to be more important than ever. Mr & Mrs Smith, shown in our picture, has always used great images.

Getting a subtle call to action in the central area used could also help sell your message to your fans and their friends, as long as they haven’t chosen the new option to only see friends in their newsfeed.

If you’re interested, the optimum size for a cover photo is 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall. The file should be less than 100 kilobytes in size: go for an sRGB JPG for speed or a PNG file for image quality.