Important Update

After many of you sent us questions concerning this post, we contacted Facebook about it and received this official answer from our Facebook Client Representative:

“Going forward we will not enforce the 20% rule for cover photos on Pages. While we still believe in using the 20% rule as a best practice and to avoid our Pages product being used for large billboards, we will only require compliance with this policy for ad images. If you choose to run an ad type that pulls in a cover photo (Page like ad or Page like sponsored story), you have two options: (1) make cover photo less than 20% text or (2) upload a new image for the ad that contains less than 20% text.”

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Facebook appears to have quietly scrapped its rule that cover images on pages could not contain more than 20 percent text, which caused confusion amongst many page administrators.

In the social network’s last round of changes to the restrictions on cover images for pages, introduced in March, several rules were stricken, but the 20 percent rule remained in place.

Facebook marketing and page-management firmTabSite reported in a post on its blog that an update to the social network’s page guidelines, posted Monday, made no mention of the 20 percent rule.

TabSite posted the image below comparing the cover image sections of the page guidelines from July 1 and March 19.

Readers: Was this a good move by Facebook that will help alleviate confusion among page admins, or will pages’ cover images now be cluttered and unattractive?