We write a bunch of content for our blog, pretty much daily. We take that content and post it to our social networks to get as much out of the time we spent on that content as we can. Occasionally we boost a post or two on Facebook.

But Facebook has a nasty rule where you can’t boost a post if it has more than 20% text in an image. Why? From Facebook:

“Images may not include more than 20% text in the image to ensure people only see high-quality content. This includes logos and slogans in images. We recommend that you use the text field in the ad to get your message across.”

But Facebook helps you with a fancy “Text Validation Tool” you can run your ad through. They’ll even warn you about your ad before hand letting you know it just might not get approved.

Ok so now we have to jump through hoops to do something special for the image for Facebook, not any other social networks…

So here are 3 ways you can get around getting dumped by Facebook when you’re creating posts you want to boost or advertise.

1. Take a smaller picture! Here we took the exact same image, put it in a powerpoint and took a picture including a ton of white space around it. Approved!

2. Re-do your image so that you have less in your image. Here we took a subset of the picture and gave a teaser of what it was about. Approved.

3. Re-do your image by ensuring text doesn’t cross any grid lines, it could double or quadruple the ratio for you. So move your text, shrink it, do whatever you need to do to ensure that it fits in 20% of the space. Clearly this one didn’t work for Facebook because text fell into 13 of their boxes. #FAIL. Basically your text can only touch 5 boxes to pass.

There you have it, ways to get around the silly Facebook 20 percent rule! Fun eh?