UPDATED on November 27th with the new Facebook Cover dimensions! 

Pixels, Inches, Centimeters OH MY! SO many options so many articles telling you different things. We compiled all the important sizes for your direct sales business to help you maximize your graphics!

You took the plunge and created a Facebook page for your business!

Great! But now what? Having a page set up isn’t going to drive business or make sales. Now that you are ready to take your business to the next social media level, you need some pictures that represent your brand well!

If you have a smart phone or tablet, you know that things look a little different there than they do on your desktop or laptop. Graphics are resized automatically by Facebook to give your readers the best format no matter what size screen they are viewing on. This is important to keep in mind as you are designing your graphics!

There are lots of different types of images you will need to use across Facebook, and they are all different sizes. Remember, these are the optimal sizes that these graphics display at. You can always use something bigger, but if you use a smaller image, it may not convert well! Images that are too small for the space may have white around them, or they may be stretched or fuzzy.

There are several handy tools available to help you create your Facebook images.  Two popular ones are PicMonkey and Canva.  Both of these have free options, are fairly user-friendly, and give you the freedom to create your graphics yourself!  Want to take your graphic skills to the next level? Here is a self paced course to help – Getting Creative with Graphics

Let’s talk about all the important ones for your business…

Facebook page’s profile picture:

A profile picture displays at 128×128 pixels on smart phones and at 170×170 on a computer screen.  The thumbnail image is as small as 32×32 pixels.  So, what does that mean?  First, note that profile pictures are square!  No matter what size you’re starting with, the end result will be a square when Facebook is done with it, so it’s a good idea to create a square image from the beginning.

Your final image should be no smaller than 170×170 pixels.  You should try to make it at least twice that, though, so the image quality is good.  500 pixels is a typical size.

One final note:  Facebook recently updated to crop profile pictures to a circular shape in ads and posts, so make sure that a circle will not crop out anything important!  You can easily check this by applying a circle crop yourself in your editing program to see what will be cut out and what will not. 

UPDATED NOVEMBER 27 2017!

Facebook Covers:

Good News!! Facebook just updated the sizing for page, group, and profile cover photos!  I know, they do this all the time, but the reasons are good.  Because the world is becoming more and more mobile, Facebook has to keep updating image specs so that they can keep providing us with the best viewing capability across all devices.

The nice thing about this recent update is that we can now use the same size for all cover photos!  This is awesome, guys!

Because 90% of Facebook’s daily users access it via mobile, Facebook decided to (finally) stop optimizing images differently across different devices!  Now, we can create a one-size-fits-all image for profiles, pages, events, and even groups and it will work across all devices!  Pretty cool, right?

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is a graphic that will answer all your questions, giving you the best placements for words and images so that your cover photos look amazing no matter what device they are accessed on!

So, all cover images should be created at 1640 x 856 pixels. Because groups still incorporate the circular cover crop, it’s a good idea to group your most important info and images into the center of the graphic so that it can be seen no matter how it’s cropped.

Facebook Feed Graphic Size:

The nice thing about sharing graphics and photos in your feed is that it doesn’t really matter how tall they are!  Sticking with a minimum of 396 pixels high will make sure you fill the allotted area and don’t get a white border, but from there on up you’re good to go!  Minimum width for a feed graphic is 476 pixels, but you can always go bigger.  Facebook will automatically resize to fit the area, and larger graphics are going to have better quality.  In fact, Facebook recommends that you use images that are 1200 pixels wide for the best quality!

Facebook Ads Size:

There are a lot of options for Facebook ads, but we’ll try to keep it simple.  The optimal size for a Facebook Ad that contains a website link is 1200×628 pixels.  However, if you’re simply creating an ad promoting page likes, then you can repurpose your actual Facebook page cover or you can create a new graphic that is 851×315.  The same size will work for a Facebook Event ad, or you can use your existing event cover!

Facebook Graphics Mystery Solved!

Creating graphics for your Facebook can be a headache!  I hope this post has cleared up some of the mystery.  Do you have any more questions about Facebook images?  Let me know in the comments!