Facebook has definitely made its home in mobile. With an astounding 53% of ad revenue coming from its 945M mobile users, and 78% of its U.S. users utilizing mobile, if you haven’t been designing posts and ads with the mobile Facebook user in mind, you’re alienating a large portion of your potential audience. But where do you start? And what do you need to know before tackling that task? We spoke with seasoned digital marketers to get their tips.
Create the unexpected.
“The newsfeed is a battleground for brands,” observes Nick Williams, Head of Design at TBG, “so any content that interrupts that experience needs to be clever, unexpected, beautiful or humorous (ideally all of these), especially when taking longer to load on mobile devices.”
Ensure your text is legible.
“A common mistake when designing is not tailoring to the final size your imagery will be outputted at,” Williams notes. “Use a font weight and point size that looks good once scaled down to fit in the news feed on your mobile device.”
Test, test, test.
“Seeing your design in situ is paramount if you want to get the most out of the advertising space,” Williams notes. “Skala Preview allows you to immediately capture what is within your photoshop file and display on your mobile, and is my preferred program for this. We create multiple variants and optimize constantly, so that we can deliver content that performs.”
Mark Edwards, Managing General Partner at Mark Edwards Worldwide concurs, “I believe in testing, and then testing again, so what I do for most of my Facebook posts is post them so that I can only see them before they go live for the public. Then I look at them on a laptop computer, desktop, Android phone, iPhone, iPad, and two Android tablets. If I can’t see the post the way I want it to look on all those devices, I fix it and go through the same proof. If it looks right, I delete the test post and let the real post go when its time to go live. Nothing beats testing, and while this takes a little time, it makes for the best quality posts possible.”
Stay up-to-date with Facebook sizing.
“Closely follow the sizing that Facebook publishes,” Kevin Janosz, COO, RITTA, advises. “Facebook post/ad sizing can change at a moment’s notice so you really have to be on the lookout for updates from them.” The latest creative specs cheat sheet can be found here.
Looking for more Facebook marketing tips? Check out our articles and how-to guides here.
