The Face­book Sur­prise - Pro­mo­tional Cover Im­ages Now Allowed?

The lat­est buzz - thanks to Mari Smith and Hugh Briss for this ex­cit­ing dis­cov­ery -  is that Face­book has lifted re­stric­tions on how to pro­mote with Face­book cover im­ages. Up un­til now there were strict rules what not to do with your cover image.

• no price or pur­chase info
• no con­tact or web­site info
• no point­ing view­ers to spe­cific Face­book fea­tures, like your cus­tom tabs
• no call to ac­tion, such as ‘sub­scribe’ or ‘like my page’

These rules have van­ished from Face­book’s guide­lines! There has­n’t been an of­fi­cial an­nounce­ment, so we’re not sure if this was by pur­pose, or a sim­ple mis­take. I guess the con­fu­sion will clear up within a few days.

If those bans have in­deed been lifted, you can now use your cover im­age for spe­cific pro­mo­tions. That’s great news, es­pe­cially since up un­til now the mar­ket­ing value of fan pages is ques­tion­able when com­pared to other mar­ket­ing channels.

UPDATE:  insidefacebook.com has talked to Face­book and got con­fir­ma­tion that the rules have in­deed changed and that you can now use your cover im­age with pro­mo­tional text.

You still can use only 20% of your im­age for text - but that’s a good rule. Af­ter all, you should­n’t ex­pect your fans to read a cover im­age with a Wall Street Jour­nal text density.

The road to suc­cess will be ONE TARGETED mes­sage and call to action.

Here’s a tool to check your Face­book cover im­age text, show­ing how much space your own cover im­age text is using.

And here’s an in­fo­graphic on how much space you have for your message:

Di­rect link to the tool: ibmm.com/fb20