Facebook Tips and Tricks Week: Effective Cover & Profile Photos

This week we are going to go through practical (and simple) steps to improve your Facebook presence. Next week, we will tackle Twitter. To start out Facebook week, I thought we would talk about profile and cover photos because I have seen a lot of clients effectively use them and I have seen many more leave them blank or post something that just doesn’t work.

1. The profile picture. This is the picture that has to include your name/brand. It is the first visual element displayed when searching and it appears with every post on Facebook. So for these reasons, your profile picture should always be brand-related. This profile picture needs to be a square. It is displayed on screen with a size of 160×160 pixels. However, the minimum picture size to upload on Facebook is 180×180 pixels. So when creating the profile picture, size it at 180×180, and make sure it looks good at 160×160. Then upload.

2. The cover picture. The cover picture is the large on the top of the screen. This photo is more dominant but only appears when a user visits your Facebook page. For many, we recommend that this is mission or campaign focused. It can change as often as you would like and should be updated regularly to keep your page fresh.The size of the cover photo is 851×315.

Facebook is the king of social media platforms. It is important that your Facebook presence looks the best of all of your social sites, so spend some time and thought on what you would like the page should look like and keep it current. This will help you build a better Facebook fan base.