Facebook has relaxed their new policy governing what you can and can’t put on your timeline cover photo. There are lots of new and exciting things you are now allowed to do with your cover photo, which is a big boost for business pages. Let’s find out more.

As a Facebook Page user it is your responsibility to comply with Facebook’s terms of use and guidelines.

I heard about these changes a while ago, but I had a hard time sharing the information with you, because both the old and the new versions said: “ Date of Last Revision: December 17, 2012”.

You can read the new revised guidelines here https://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php and the date now clearly has been updated to March 06, 2013.

More likely you will need to clear your cache to see the revised guidelines or just copy and paste this link into a new browser where you’re not logged into Facebook.

Facebook’s New Timeline Cover Guidelines are:

Noticeably present in the new rules is the Cover photo 20% rule. This rule forces users to keep the header real estate to feature 20% or less space allocated to text in the cover image. Text in the logo does count to that 20% mark.

The current cover guide now simply states:

All covers are public. This means that anyone who visits your Page will be able to see your cover. Covers can’t be deceptive, misleading, or infringe on anyone else’s copyright. You may not encourage people to upload your cover to their personal timelines. Covers may not include images with more than 20% text.

Old Guidelines for Facebook Cover Photos:

Covers may not include:

• price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it on socialmusic.com”;
• contact information such as a website address, email, mailing address, or information that should go in your Page’s “About” section;
• references to Facebook features or actions, such as “Like” or “Share” or an arrow pointing from the cover photo to any of these features; or
• calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends.”

Really Facebook just simplified the rules — and boiled it down to a very basic 20% text rule:

Put whatever text you want on your cover, but keep it under 20%.

I’m happy to see that the tight rules have been removed because Facebook had a tough time enforcing them, and I had a hard time to explain my clients why they can not have some call to action while “other Facebook pages” had those call to actions on their cover images.

I’m thankful for the new simplicity. Will you update your Facebook Page cover photo according to the new rules? Check out our Facebook Cover photos we created and give us a call to either update your old cover photo or create a new one for you according to the new regulations.

Keep in mind that with the new News Feed Facebook launching, when people like your page, a cropped version of your cover photo will show in the news feed of the new fan’s friends — so you should definitely have a cover photo that represents your business well.

What do YOU think of the new Facebook Cover photo rules? Above you can see the new cover photo we created for our facebook page with the allowed 20% content ratio, yet we incorporated the call to action.