Some of Facebook’s rules are often perplexing and it is evident that they have never heard of the mantra “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But it is nice that you can rely on their consistency and they have once again introduced an odd and seemingly unnecessary rule, which means that promoted posts will be disapproved if the image contains too much text. When recently attempting to promote a post with an image on the AccuraCast Facebook page, we received the message below.
Accompanying this email was a PDF that explained the policy in more detail. It explains that each image used in a promoted post is scanned by a “grid-based text detection tool”, which determines the amount of text used in an image.
Text can only appear in a maximum of 5 squares and surely this will mean that a vast number of promoted posts will be disapproved, with many brands suffering as a result of this. Considering the success of visual posts on the social networking site, surely Facebook are shooting themselves in the foot and it is likely to drive advertising brands to find alternatives, of which there are plenty.
What are your views on this?
