Have you ever spent way too much time struggling to design or crop an image for your Facebook cover photo, only to discover that you can’t quite get it to look the way you want it to?
Maybe you’ve nailed the cover design perfectly for your desktop computer only to find it cropped badly on your mobile?
You’re not alone! In this post we will take a careful look at Facebook’s guidelines for cover photo dimensions, and the best practices for representing your business with a cover photo or design.
In this article we’re going to cover:
Why are Facebook Cover Photos for Businesses Important?
When it comes to representing your business on Facebook, it’s important that you design your cover photo carefully. Quite often, your cover photo will be the first point of contact between your audience and your business/brand on on social media.
Facebook has over 2.7 billion monthly active users and continues to boasts its position as the most popular social media platform on a global scale. Since Facebook’s algorithm is geared towards providing it’s users with (what facebook deems) as the best possible online experience, keeping your branding clear and consistent is very important. Since over 2 billion people could see your Page, it’s essential to make sure your cover photo is perfect.
The Best Size for Facebook Cover Photos in 2022
According to Facebook, cover photos and images display in their optimal format with the dimensions 820 pixels wide by 312 pixels tall on desktop computers while cover photos for smartphones and mobile devices prefer 640 pixels wide by 360 pixels tall.
To get the graphics right in order for your cover photo to look great on both desktop and mobile devices, we recommend setting up your artwork with the dimensions 820px wide by 360px tall.
PRO TIP: Try to keep any type design or important information such as key message or logo central to the design. This will ensure that your cover image will be wide enough when displayed on desktop computers and tall enough when displayed on mobile phones.
Cover Images for Desktop vs. Mobile Devices
Facebook will automatically crop into the top and bottom of your page’s cover photo on desktop devices and the left and right sides of your cover photo on mobile devices to adapt to the different visual spaces.
As your branding and/or key messaging is important, ensure any key information is kept within the “Safe Zone” area and constrained to the dimensions below:
Set up your artwork bounding box area to be 820px x 360px remembering that desktop cover photos will get automatically cropped by 24px on the top and bottom of the image. This means that you will lose 24px from the top of your image and from the bottom respectively.
Mobile cover photos get cropped quite a bit from the left and right of your cover image. This means that you will essentially lose 90px from the left and right of your photo or design so by keeping the main part of your design central within the safe zone, it will ensure your cover image will be displayed well on any device.
Cover Image Useful Tips
One thing to note is that Facebook will compress your cover image in order to reduce file size which often results in a the image losing quality. We recommend that it is always better to save your image as a PNG file as JPG’s will most often end up blurry and terrible.
If you are struggling to design the perfect image for your cover photo, Canva is a super-useful tool I can happily recommend to help even the least savvy graphic designer design great and impacting graphics for all their social media needs.
Final Thoughts
In the ever evolving, highly competitive online space, getting your cover photo perfect should be just as important as any other part of business’ branding and once you have your design nailed and looking good within the “safe zone”, your page will be ready to showcase and promote!
If you would like any more information about smarter online marketing, or to have the experts take care of all your social media and online branding needs, contact us for a free consultation with our team today.
