Images are an important part to the overall Facebook experience. In many situations, they are the culprits for engagement and ultimately getting users to talk. All are great things in the social media universe.
But not all Facebook images are created equal and by simply uploading and tapping post isn’t enough.
The orientation of your image—whether it’s horizontal (landscape), vertical (portrait), or square—will determine which dimensions Facebook uses to showcase your image.
The magic number you should live by in most situations is 470 pixels. Why is this number important you may ask?
Well, no matter the orientation of the image, you upload, Facebook will resize it to 470 pixels. That means, a square image will resize to 470×470 and images that are originally smaller than 470 squared could appear blurry, as they will be sized up.
In addition to the blurriness, with landscape images smaller than 470 pixels wide, your image could appear at less than the 470-pixel width and aligned to the left. This will mean whitespace to the right of the image. For a business this doesn’t look very professional and probably won’t get the same impact and engagement as an image that is sized properly on the newsfeed.
The same goes for portrait, or long type photos. If you upload one of these photos, it will be scaled to a height of 394 pixels and align itself to the left. The adjusted width will be related to the 394 pixels meaning there is also a chance that you will also get a bunch of white space off to the right side and won’t be maximizing all of the available space provided by Facebook.
Ideally, if you are looking to post a single photo and get maximum newsfeed “real estate” you will want to have your photo sized to 940×788 pixels. It will automatically adapt to the screen it is being shown on (laptop, phone, tablet.).
If you aren’t a Photoshop wiz and aren’t sure how to resize images, Canva is a great tool that makes resizing pretty easy.
Now, all the specs above are the requirements for a single photo with just text in the post.
If you are sharing text that includes a link, very often Facebook will pull an image from that external link to include in the post as well as provide some more text below the image. That doesn’t mean you need to use that image (or text for that matter.). You can manually delete it and add your own photo using the sizes above.
If though you want to keep the copy below and just update the image, it will be scaled to fill the box of 470 pixels wide by 246 pixels tall. That means your image that you want to include, could have elements on the top or bottom that get cropped off from being shown on the feed. – Something you probably want to try to avoid, as it too won’t look very professional.
To take it one step further, if the link you are sharing doesn’t have the proper image tags installed or the image in the link, is not large enough, Facebook will not display it in full width. Instead, it will create a thumbnail that will be placed in a small box just to the left of the text provided from the link. In a post of this nature you will get more copy included but today, people are visual and they want to see great, appealing photos in their feed, not a ton of text.
As you can see, not all images are created equal when it comes to posting on Facebook. It may take some trial and error but remember, you can always delete a post that doesn’t look right and revise it.
For more information on how to best optimize your images for Facebook, including carousels, collages, photo gallery image posts and the new 20% rule, contact The Interactive Imprint at 954-254-1650 or visit TheInteractiveImprint.com.
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