5 tips for choosing a killer photo for your Facebook ad

You can't ignore Facebook in your digital marketing efforts, but if you don't have experience with reviewing and selecting ad copy, picking the right image for your Facebook ad can be tough. Here are a few tips for selecting that perfect image that draws in clicks from your audience:

Make it relevant. Your photo must be an obvious tie-in with the text you're putting in the ad. Everything has to convey the same message, otherwise it confuses people. Also, and this is fairly obvious, the ad has to be relevant to the audience you're targeting. Not only does your audience need to relate to the ad, but it has to be easy for them to find value in whatever you're promoting.

Get rid of text in the image. Technically, Facebook allows a small amount of text, but they will reject an ad if they consider the text in the image to be excessive. If you must convey some abstract concept in the image, it's better to figure out a way to replace the text with an icon that people recognize.

By the way, don't use third-party logos in your image, either. Facebook rejects these as being an implied endorsement.

Keep it positive. Facebook doesn't like ads that are designed to scare their users too much, or to create negative feelings. Instead, they want the ads they serve to be all rainbows and puppy dogs (metaphorically). The bottom line here is that all your images should have a feel-good factor.

Take advantage of the Shutterstock library. This is a relatively new feature in Facebook, which allows you to use for-fee images at no charge in your ads only. The advantages of professional stock photos are that they're high-resolution, and the photos are taken by skilled photographers who know how to make their shots visually compelling.

Use human faces whenever you can. The human eye can recognize a face much faster than just about anything else, and as a marketer you should do your best to take advantage of this fact.

It's even better if you can show images of people using your product or service. It goes a long way to make people think that your ad belongs in their news feed.

Once you've mastered the use of images in Facebook, come back to this site, because I'll soon be writing a similar article on how to choose (and make) the best videos for Facebook ads.

See you next time!