Changes on Facebook - to 20% rule.

Facebook has recently announced that they are removing the 20% text rule for ad images. In this article, we share insights on the changes and opinions of experts on how this will influence brands’ social advertising.

Surprise, surprise! Facebook has news for social advertisers – the 20% rule for ad images is now in the past. The rule was prohibiting advertisers from covering more than 20% of ad images with text. From now on, the social network allows you to use as much text on your graphics as you wish when you advertise on Facebook or Instagram. They have been testing this change since April 2016, but it is now official and will be rolled out worldwide in the following weeks.

What does this mean for your business?

Even though the rule was removed, Facebook will continue following their policy towards preference for ad images with little or no text. In order to provide а good user experience, Facebook will provide less distribution and higher costs to images with heavy text. So, the more text you have in an ad image, the lower the reach and the higher the ad price.

What is coming next?

Facebook is introducing a new way of assessing the amount of text in your ad graphics. They have created 4 categories defining the text in your ad as:

• OK
• Low
• Medium
• High

You can check how your image ranks when using the ad create tools and Power Editor. There are also some exceptions from this rule such as: movie posters, book covers, album covers, etc.

What do experts say about the change?

In order to help businesses utilize this new opportunity, we’ve asked social media experts to share their opinion on it. Read some insights from them on how this change will influence advertisers and where Facebook is heading with this.

 Speaker and Consultant, Plus Your Business!

“In large part, any image that is being used to grab attention is a tool, irrespective of the amount of text on it or not. Being free to use an image to psychologically engage a person is an art form now and this new approach will give people more freedom to explore what works.”

 Socialmedia-architect, RauwCC

“Facebook letting go of their 20% rule was the highlight of my day! It was a stupid rule. I get the general idea behind it. They don’t want the timeline to be spammed with images of 50% discount coupons. But I think the self-cleaning capacity of Facebook is good enough to let the automation of their judgement go.

Facebook knows 85% of their users watch video without sound. So to get your message across you need to use text. Business Insider for example does this very well. But they use a lot more than 20% text in most of their video frames. And then I have not even mentioned motion graphics. You couldn’t promote video’s with more than 20% text in the video still. So letting go of the 20% rule had to be done to become a decent video platform.”

 SEM Specialist, IIH Nordic

“The change doesn’t mean a lot as too much copy makes pictures look like a classic web banner, and users are getting really good at ignoring them. But approval processes will be a bit easier. Sometimes Facebook has interpreted graphics as copy and thus blocking ads.

One of the reasons for the rise of Facebook was that they didn’t allow the anarchy we saw on MySpace. Now Facebook are setting the advertisers a bit more free, and we really hope that they don’t allow for too much noise in the newsfeed as it will only result in network abandonment or even more users installing ad blockers.”

 Creative Director 

“With the new four rules the challenge with creating great ads is the same and the focal point is still conversions. It is still relevant to challenge if the ads will make your audience click, like, comment, save etc. That can be done in a multitude of ways and the new rules will in theory allow creatives to range from textless images to pure text – at the cost of potential reach.

Facebook wants to make it easier and more flexible for advertisers by moving away from the 20% rule that have confused many. But Facebook’s mindset has not changed. Ads with less text are still claimed to have better impact with audiences.”

 Business Advisor, Komfo

“This doesn’t change much for me. We may see fewer disapproved ads, but we might see a lot more poorly performing ads. And then the first questions that arises will be whether we can actually see that an ad is performing poorly because of the image or we have to guess.

I honestly liked the old rule I just wished the grid tool was a little better and it would be easier for advertisers to use. Potentially with more boxes in the grid. Flexibility with ads is key; no one wants to see ads full of text.”

 Social Media & Product Specialist, Komfo

“I don’t think we are going to change the logic we use when creating images for Facebook, but it will of course be very nice not to have ads rejected due to too much text in the images we use, and have to have our graphic designer create new images etc. – even if we have checked them and created them to comply with the 20% rule. We could potentially use images with more text occasionally – e.g. with a quote from a client. But it won’t be much.

I think Facebook might have realized that images containing text can also be very relevant and engaging for the people seeing them – even more so, if they look nice graphically. “