Social Media Marketing - The secrets of facebook thumbnails - Video

Welcome to this quick video about Facebook Pictures. You probably noticed that sometimes Facebook chooses the wrong part of the picture for the thumbnail in the strip at the top of the page or in an album like this. Here the BBC's Apprentice page. Just the top they seem to have something against foreheads! The reason is; the image they've used is a tall portrait-format picture and they haven't reckoned with Facebook's cropping. You can't edit the thumbnail in the photo strip the top of the page so this is the result. Facebook has to reshape pictures to fit the two places where they appear as thumbnails It's not just photo strips in Pages they get cropped. This, on the left, is from a friend of mine. He seems to be featuring his tie in this album thumbnail, and on the right is a picture from a company Page with the poor girl's eyes trimmed off nicely! In both these cases if you click on the picture you'll see their faces - but here's how to avoid the nasty cropping in the first place. It's fairly predictable how Facebook is going to crop your pictures in photo strips at the top of Facebook pages. The examples here are taken from actual pictures on Facebook - the original images in green and the purple box shows the area that was used by Facebook in the photo strip The width of each thumbnail is three quarters of the full width. It’s centred, but ever so slightly to the right of centre. The Borders at the top and bottom are selected automatically by Facebook, so that the depth that is cropped at the bottom is three times as large as the height of the top cropping Now if you use a portrait shot, Facebook loses less from the width but still maintains the same ratio between the top and bottom cropping. The bottom crop is again three times the depth of crop, when compared to the top. Now this is the case for the photo strip at the top of the Page. In the gallery a little more of the width is cropped, but if you upload an extremely tall narrow image something a little odd occurs. On Pages in the top photo strip at the top of the page it reverts back to showing just three quarters of the width; it zooms in, if you like. But in the photo gallery the thumbnail doesn't zoom in and you see the width you'd expect. So here the purple area shows the gallery thumbnail - the choice of Facebook makes for an album, and the brown area shows the thumbnail that Facebook chooses for its photo strip. Obviously they’re different, so my advice is to crop tall pictures down before you upload them - even if somewhere near the top, like that, is thumbnail you'd like. Confusing isn't it?! For all your social media projects, contact Aimiable Consulting, and also watch for the next video with tips on how to brand of Facebook page.