Why Facebook makes me angry.
No this isn’t some rant about people posting silly things on Facebook that are offensive. This is actually a problem with Facebook from a design/advertising perspective. This is a problem that changed my workflow for over a year (and will probably continue to do so until Facebook addresses this)
The facebook 20% grid.
Can you tell the difference between the images below?
The difference is very subtle, but one of these near identical designs would not be allowed to have paid spend put behind it. Take a look at the images below and you can see that the text on one version takes up six boxes meanwhile the other takes up four. According to Facebook’s advertising guidelines “If text is present in 6 or more boxes, then the image more than likely has more than 20% text and may not eligible to be used in an ad in News Feed or the right column.”
The only thing that has been changed between these two images is the text was lowered 10 pixels. The type size didn’t change, the leading stayed the same, and the tracking is identical.
I understand why Facebook has a text size rule, it allows them to hopefully raise the quality of the ads that get shown. However, I think that a better solution exists to this problem. A dynamic tool where the Facebook advertising salesperson could simply drag and select areas of text. Allowing them a quick and effective method to accurately judge the amount of text vs total area without having to use an antiquated grid.
Some people have been blogging about the death of the 20% rule. I however, don’t think its dead. I think it all depends on the Facebook representative you get.