Safe Zones for 2025: Instagram, Facebook and TikTok

What are Safe Zones?

Safe zones on social media are designated areas where content can appear without being cut off or covered by other elements. They’re important for ensuring that your message is fully visible and engages the audience and hence produce an effective social media design, increase mobile optimization, and better visual content. Take a look below to learn more about different platform specifications in 2025!

Instagram

Safe zones on Instagram are areas of content within your posts such as reels and stories that are visible across all different devices and formats. 

Keeping safe zones in mind is crucial as not putting content within the safe zones can cut off some elements on your post and even miss out important messages. This can bust your visual content and decline the impact of the post.

For example, putting an important message such as the date of the event at the very top corner of your reel video that is outside the safe zone. So when your audience scroll their feed, they won’t be able to see that message unless they click on the reel to see the full screen.

Safe Zones

Instagram image posts don’t have safe zones since the platform displays them in full, regardless of dimensions. However, posts appear in a 1:1 square ratio on your profile feed. To ensure a visually consistent feed, keep important content within this ratio.

Although Reels and Stories share the same dimensions, their safe zones differ. Let’s explore them below.

Story Feed:

Leave a 250 pixels buffer at the top and bottom of your 1920 pixels x 1080 pixels story. This prevents usernames, profiles picture and interaction buttons from covering your elements.

Reel Feed:

Leave a 108 pixels buffer at the top, 320 pixels at the bottom, 60 pixels from the left, and 120 pixels from the right of your 1080-1920 pixels content.

Facebook

For cover photos, whether or not your elements can be seen varies throughout different formats and devices such as desktop, phone and thumbnail.

Safe Zones

Facebook Cover Image

Images for cover photo are essentially 16:9 ratio. 

For desktop view aim for 851×315 pixels whereas mobile view aim for 640×360 pixels.

To make it easier and flexible across all devices, aim to put content in the centre within 820×360 pixels but aiming slightly to the right so it won’t be covered by your profile picture that would cover half of your cover from the left.

Facebook Posts

For postings on Facebook, above are the recommended dimensions – portrait (1080 pixels x 1350 pixels), square (1080 pixels x 1080 pixels), and landscape (1200 pixels x627 pixels). Find out more about Facebook image recommended image dimensions and safe zones for an effective social media design.

TikTok

Safe Zones

Focus on placing crucial elements at the centre of your video and leaving buffers of 108 pixels from the top, 320 pixels from the bottom, 60 pixels from the left and 120 pixels from the right of your 9:16 ratio content.

Same with Instagram this safe zone will prevent UI elements such as buttons, accounts name, CTA, description and others from covering your content elements. 

Do account for auto subtitles on your TikTok content as this can obstruct your content element. You could also remove the auto subtitles by toggling the option “Allow auto-captions” removed from the upload process.

The Takeaway

Ensuring your content placed within these safe zones prevents elements from being obscured by UI components like buttons and subtitles. By keeping important elements within these areas, you ensure that nothing crucial is cut off or missed, making your ad more effective in conveying its message. This is a good practice to save time from recreating and reuploading the content to ensure it is not covered and is visible to your audience. Understanding safe zones ensures your audiences always see your content in full and makes your ad more effective than ever. If learning the safe zones for each social media platform seems like a headache, general safe zones across all social media platforms is sufficient to ensure your design successfully conveys important messages without any obstruction. Apart from the safe zone, learn more ways to optimize and enhance your social media strategy.