Best Profile Pictures For Facebook
Finding the best time to post to Facebook can massively help your business stand out and reach more of your audience—even as Facebook organic reach continues to decline.
But knowing the best times to post, can be a challenge and we’d love to help.
Honestly, I usually think of Facebook cover photos when I think of first impressions. After all, your cover photo appears at the top of your page's Timeline (as shown. Jan 02, 2020 In 2020, the ideal Facebook profile photo size is 360 x 360 pixels. But Facebook profile photos must be at least a minimum size of 180 x 180 pixels. The optimal size for a Facebook cover photo is 828 x 465 pixels. Does your Facebook profile picture look 😍😍😍? Studies show that we can’t see pictures of ourselves objectively.
In this guide, we’ll share exactly how you can find the best time to post content on your Facebook Page for maximum reach, exposure, and engagement.
Ready to jump in?
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Is there a best time to post on Facebook?
There probably isn’t a single best time to post on Facebook.
Plenty of studies that have attempted to uncover a ‘best time to post to Facebook’, Twitter, Instagram and almost every other social media marketing channel, with each study finding a wide range of results (we’ve even created our own studies here at Buffer).
According to a Buffer study, the best time to post to Facebook is between 1pm – 3pm on during the week and Saturdays. We also found that engagement rates are 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays.
However, other studies uncovered that the best time to post to Facebook is:
- Thursdays and Fridays from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. are the best times to post on Facebook [Hubspot]
- Thursday at 8 p.m.  [TrackMaven]
- 1–4 p.m. late into the week and on weekends [CoSchedule]
- Off-peak [Buzzsum0]
All of these studies can be helpful to point marketers in the right direction. But almost every study reveals a different ‘best time to post’ and, in reality, the best time to post depends on a number of factors that are specific to every business: What’s your industry? In what location is your audience based? When are they online? Are you sponsoring your post?
We’d love to flip the conversation and say that instead of looking for a universal ‘best time to post’, maybe we should be focusing specifically on when is the best time for your brand to post.
Why there’s no universal best time to post on Facebook
The content crush is truly upon us. There’s more content shared to Facebook than any of us could ever consume, and as such, Facebook’s News Feed algorithm helps to determine what is shown to us every time we open up Facebook.
On their Business blog, Facebook’s VP of Advertising Technology, Brian Boland explains:
On average, there are 1,500 stories that could appear in a person’s News Feed each time they log onto Facebook. For people with lots of friends and Page likes, as many as 15,000 potential stories could appear any time they log on.
As a result, competition in News Feed — the place on Facebook where people view content from their family and friends, as well as businesses — is increasing, and it’s becoming harder for any story to gain exposure in News Feed.
Whenever you post to Facebook, you’re essentially competing against at least 1,500 others post for a place in the News Feed and timing is only one of a number of factors that determines which content appears.
With this in mind, it’s also possible that the best time to post could also be the worst time. Let’s say a study found the best time to publish is 6pm on a Friday, and every brand was to try and push content to their audience at that time, it’s likely that very few of those posts would be seen due to such high competition. The same is true for saying off-peak times are best to publish – if all brands post off-peak then there will be more competition, and so they should go back to posting at peak time.
It’s all very muddled and there’s no clear answer. As such, I’d argue that there’s no specific time that’s best to post to Facebook.
So, when should you post to Facebook? A couple of strategies you can try
If there’s no ‘best’ time to post, how do you decide when to share your content to Facebook?
To answer this question, I feel like there are two approaches we could use:
- When your data tells you
- When it’s relevant
1. When your data tells you
When it comes to marketing and digital strategy, the best data is always your own. And, thankfully, Facebook has a ton of data available for all page owners and admins. A comprehensive understanding of your own audience on Facebook and how your content is performing will bring more success, than generic insights drawn from studies on a wide variety of Pages from a range of industries and brands.
2. When it’s relevant
This one is a little less scientific. But some content will work best in-the-moment or at a time when it’s most relevant. A great example of this is the content many sports teams share to Facebook to update fans on the scores or breaking news.
For your business, the same can also be true. Some pieces of content will perform best when they’re relevant. For example, the best time to share content related to the launch of your new product tends to be directly following the announcement. Or if you had an advert on a local TV station, it’s best to create and share social content around the same time that it’s broadcast.
How to use Insights to find your best time to post on Facebook
If you’re looking to find the best time to post on Facebook, the first best place to start is Facebook Insights.
To see your Page Insights, click Insights at the top of your Page:
Once you’re in the Page Insights dashboard, there’s a wealth of data available to you. For this post, though, we’re going to dive into a couple of specific areas to help you discover when to post your content.
How to find out when your fans are online
From the Insights dashboard, select Posts in the left-hand column menu. This will take you to a detailed breakdown of the days and time your fans are most active on Facebook:Â
This chart shows the average times across the week. You can hover over each individual day to see an overlay of how that day looks vs the averages. Here’s an example of how Sunday’s tend to look for our Page (the dark blue line is data for Sunday):
What does this data tell us?
Here at Buffer, we can see our audience is online 7 days per week and that there’s no specific day where we see a spike. We can also see that from around 9 am in the morning the number of people online is gradually increasing up until around 4 pm where the number begins to decline slightly.
There are plenty of ways to interpret this data. But, to me, this would suggest our best times to post are during the work day between the hours of 9 am – 5 pm when our audience are most active on Facebook. I’d recommend testing a variation of times between those hours to see what works and if there’s a best time at all.
Another experiment we’ve been trying off the back of this data is posting at off-peak times. Brian, our social media manager, has recently been posting when less of our audience is online and we’ve been seeing some success between 3 am – 5 am.
How to find posting times of successful posts
Facebook Insights records reach and engagement figures for every post you share to your Facebook Page. This data can be found in the same place as the data for when your fans are online. Head to your Page Insights, click Posts and below the graph showing times your fans are online, you’ll see ‘All Posts Published’.
Here, in the ‘Published’ column, you can see the date and time when each post was published to your Facebook Page. With this data you’re looking out for any trends regarding the times. For example, do posts published around a specific time tend to receive more reach or engagement.
Note: If your posts are Sponsored or Boosted (like many of ours in the above screenshot), this could also skew your data a little as these posts are likely to gain significantly more reach than organic posts regardless or the time they’re published.
What does this data tell us?
Personally, I think our data on the Buffer Facebook Page is pretty inconclusive at the moment. It’s clear that posts published between around 10 am – 12 pm seem to do well, as do posts at around 5 pm. But I’d love to test a bunch more variables before making any clear conclusions.
Putting your data into action
Once you’ve identified your best times to post to Facebook, it’s worth testing those assumptions in the real world. One of the easiest ways to do this is by scheduling your Facebook posts—this saves you from having to open up Facebook and manually post at each of your best times.
Buffer offers a simple and intuitive way to schedule your Facebook posts at the ideal times. Here’s a quick guide on how to test your best posting times using Buffer:
1. Connect your Facebook Page to Buffer
First, head over to your Buffer dashboard.
Then, if you’re on the free Individual Plan, click the Connect More button at the bottom left of your dashboard and then click Page or Group under the Facebook option.
If you’re on a paid plan (Awesome, Business, Enterprise), click on the  Add a Social Account button at the top left of your dashboard and then choose Facebook Page or Facebook Group.
2. Set up a new scheduling time
Once you’ve connected your Facebook Page to Buffer, you can set your ideal posting times as a schedule and Buffer will automatically schedule your content for those best times.
To set up a new schedule, select the social account you’d like to customize the posting schedule for on the left hand side of your dashboard and then click on Settings > Posting Schedule.
From the drop down menu, underneath “Add a new posting time”, choose the day or days you’d like to add the time to. In addition to being able to select specific days, you can also choose to add a posting time to “Every Day”, “Weekdays” or “Weekends”. Then, select the time you’d like to add and then click Add Posting Time.
Once a time has been added to your schedule, it can be modified by changing the hours and/or minutes. Times can be deleted from your schedule by hovering over the time and clicking the  X icon.
3. Add content to your queue
Now you’re all set and ready to start scheduling content.
When you’re scheduling posts, you don’t need to think about the date and time it should be published, all you need to do is add it to your Queue and it will automatically be placed into the next available time slot and published as part of your usual posting flow.
Try Buffer Publish for free now with a 14-day trial.
When one of your Facebook friends gets married, the chances are you’ll see their wedding photos stuck to the top of your News Feed all day, regardless of the time they’re posted. This happens because wedding photos, whether you like them or not, are great content and as soon as they’re posted, a bunch of people rush to like, share and comment on them.
If you want to succeed on Facebook, your content will be just as important as the timing.
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One of the first things I do when I join a new social network is to upload a profile picture.
But which profile picture should I choose? Is there a best one?
Profile pictures have always been a bit of a gray area for me inasmuch as I post a picture I think looks good without knowing its actual effect on my audience.
Is there such thing as a perfect, best profile picture?
Interestingly, there’s been some rather great research about the different elements of profile pictures that have the biggest impact on an audience. The psychology and science behind a perfect profile picture leaves some great guidelines on how to influence your audience and possibly gain more followers.
I’m happy to share what we’ve found about the perfect profile picture, based on the best science, research, and psychology out there.
The 7 Elements of the Best Profile Pictures
In 40 milliseconds, we’re able to draw conclusions about people based on a photo.
That’s less than one-half of one-tenth of a second. Wow!
This finding from Psychological Science underscores the vital importance of a profile picture and the effect it has on making an impression.
There’s been a host of research done on the various elements of a profile picture—how to look, how to not look, what to wear, whether to smile. The specifics of these studies are outlined below.
Here’s an overview of all the best practices for coming up with the best profile picture on social media:
- Smile with teeth
- Dark-colored suits, light colored buttondowns
- Jawline with a shadow
- Head-and-shoulders, or head-to-waist photo
- Squinch
- Asymmetrical composition
- Unobstructed eyes
Worth trying out:
- Facing the camera (or not)
- Bright background
And things to avoid:
- Hats
- Sunglasses
- Hair, glare, and shadows over the eyes
- Laughing smile
- Sexiness
Here’s a bit more about the science, research, and psychology behind these recommendations.
How to appear approachable, helpful, and attractive
Researchers at the Department of Psychology at University of York analyzed 1,000 images of faces in order to find the specific facial tics and features that help make a good first impression.
They came up with 65 different features that could affect one’s perceptions, things like “nose curve” and “cheekbone position” and “head area.” For each of the 65 features, they noted the effect of each on the following three distinct dimensions:
- Approachability – “Does this person want to help or harm me?”
- Dominance – “Can this person help or harm me?”
- Youthful-attractiveness – “Might this person be a good romantic partner or a rival?”
(It’s amazing the level of detail the researchers found. They created cartoon-like faces based on every possible variation.)
Here were the findings:
(How to read this chart: App stands for Approachability, Yo-Att stands for Youthful-attractiveness, and Dom stands for Dominance. A positive number means a positive correlation, and a negative number means a negative correlation.)
Overall, the researchers noted that the most meaningful factors in each of the three dimensions seemed to group around common traits.
For approachability, the mouth was key.
- Mouth area
- Mouth height
- Mouth width
- Mouth gap
- Bottom lip curve
This is consistent with previous research that smiling is a key component to approachability.
For youthful-attractiveness, the eyes were key.
- Eye area
- Iris area
- Eye height
- Eye width
This is consistent with previous research that relatively large eyes link to a youthful appearance.
For dominance:
- Eyebrow height
- Cheek gradient
- Eye gradient
- Skin saturation
- Skin value variation
These all link to stereotypically masculine appearance.
In the final report, the researchers put together composite faces that show the range in each of the three dimensions—e.g., from least approachable to most approachable, left-to-right. Can you notice the variations in the aforementioned facial features from one face to the next?
How to appear likable, competent, and influential
PhotoFeeler, a neat tool that lets you get feedback on your profile pictures via feedback from actual people who vote on your picture, shared their learnings from over 60,000 ratings of competence, likability, and influence that were left on photos submitted to the PhotoFeeler app.
Here’s a quick overview of what they learned:
- Don’t block your eyes. Sunglasses drop likeability score, and hair, glare, and shadows drop competence and influence.
- Define your jawline. A shadow line that outlines the jaw all the way around helps with likability, competence, and influence.
- Show your teeth when you smile. A closed mouth smile has a small increase likability. A laughing smile increases likability even more, but you lose ground in competence and influence. The best smile, according to PhotoFeeler, is a smile with teeth. This leads to gains across the board in likability (nearly twice that of a closed-mouth smile), competence, and influence.
- Try formal dress. Dark-colored suits and light-colored buttondowns (with ties, for men) had the greatest effect on competency and influence out of all other factors.
- Head and shoulders (or head to waist). Close-ups on just headshots brought scores down, as did full body shots.
- Try a squinch. A squinch is a slight squint. The idea behind it is that wide eyes look fearful, vulnerable, and uncertain. Slightly squinted eyes may come across as comfortable and confident. PhotoFeeler found that squinching eyes has an increase across the board in competence, likability, and influence.
(The photo on the left is the normal, wide-eyed headshot. The one on the right is a squinch.)
What avatars can teach us about profile pictures
Researcher Katrina Fong of Toronto’s York University conducted a study on 2D avatars, coming up with some neat observations that could extrapolate to profile pictures.
Participants were more interested in being friends with people whose avatars had
- open eyes
- oval face
- smiling expression
- brown hair
A few characteristics that turned participants away—going so far as to signal traits like intorversion, neuroticism, and disagreeableness—included
- neutral or negative expression
- black or short hair
- hat or sunglasses
Should your profile picture be alluring?
Former Oregon State psychologist Elizabeth Daniels polled 118 teenage girls and young adult women about their impressions of a 20-year-old woman’s Facebook profile. Half of the participants were shown a sexy profile picture; the other half saw a more conservative image.
The results: The conservative image won out in all three categories.
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- Attractiveness: “I think she is pretty”
- Social: “I think she could be a friend of mine”
- Competence: “I have confidence in her ability to get a job done”
Caitlin Dewey of the Washington Times had a great takeaway from the study:
It demonstrates the degree to which, even among footloose digital natives, edgy photos are seen as a sign that the subject isn’t credible or competent.
Which matters more: Profile pic or bio?
Dating website OkCupid is well-known for its data analysis. Last year, they released some interesting details on the influence of profile pictures compared to text descriptions. How much of each matter for a person’s overall impression of your profile?
OkCupid hid their profile text for a sample of users, showing just the profile picture. This gave the site two sets of data to analyze: one for “the picture and the text together” and one for “the picture alone.”
Their takeaway:
Essentially, the text is less than 10% of what people think of you.
Guy Kawasaki’s 4 keys to profile pictures
Canva’s Guy Kawasaki, an early evangelist for all things tech and social media, has found four factors to be key for a profile picture.
- Faces only. No family, friends, dogs, logos, etc.
- Asymmetrical. Use the Rule of Thirds to create your profile picture
- Face the light. The source of light should come in front of you.
- At least 600 pixels wide. There are varying shapes and sizes of profile pictures on social media. A 600-pixel image will look great no matter where it’s viewed.
The asymmetrical advice in particular has a lot of solid psychology and design history behind it.
The Rule of Thirds is a method for composing the elements of an image to be visually pleasing and to be in sync with the way our eyes prefer to scan an image. Photographers know the Rule of Thirds well; it is a foundational piece of photography.
The way it works is by dividing an image into a grid of thirds both horizontally and vertically. Basically, put a tic-tac-toe board on an image.
The tic-tac-toe board creates intersections of lines, and according to Rule of Thirds, these intersections are where the eye is most likely to be drawn.
The design lesson here is to place your key elements along these intersections. Avoid placing a key element right in the center.
Blogger, author, and speaker Rebekah Radice does this to great effect with her profile picture.
To face the camera or not to face the camera
Another study from OkCupid looked at the profile pictures of over 7,100 users and noted which effects brought the most contacts. One of the most interesting takeaways here was the effect of looking at the camera vs. looking off-camera.
For a woman’s profile picture, the greatest effects were noticed when looking at the camera.
For a man’s profile picture, the greatest effect came when looking away from the camera.
What eye-tracking studies say
“You look where they look.”
This title from a Usable Word blog post provides a great synopsis for the research on eye-tracking studies.
We follow the eyes of the people we see on screen. Looking directly into the camera can help make a direct connection with someone. Looking to the left or right will help guide the reader’s eyes in that direction (toward a “Follow” button maybe?)
KISSmetrics has done a great job of explaining a bit about this reasearch:
Human beings have a natural tendency to follow the gaze of others, and we have been coached since birth to follow arrows directing us to where we should be looking/going.
And this picture helps put it into great perspective:
Try a bright, orange background
Orbit Media dug up this gem from Rand Fishkin of Moz: Test different background colors for your photos.
Brightly colored backgrounds are Rand’s recommendation. For his personal profiles, he found that orange worked best. (Rand has since changed to a green background.)
Summary
What have you found to work best for your profile picture?
The recommendations here cover all sorts of research, science, and psychology. They may be great jumping off points for research of your own. If you’re interested in trying something new with your profile picture, consider trying images where you’re
- Smiling
- Squinching
- Asymmetrical
- Head-to-shoulders
- Head-&-torso
- Facing the camera
And feel free to report what works best! If you’d like to share any possibilities for profile pictures, it’d be great to see them and hear your thoughts in the comments.
Image sources: Pablo, The Noun Project, UnSplash, OkCupid, KISSmetrics, PhotoFeeler
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