How to Get the Most out of Your Facebook Fanpage Picture
A few of my social media and SEO posts are long and involve thinking and (shudder) math!! This post is the exact opposite. It's short, sweet and easy and requires so little thought you can read it with your morning coffee.
As I've talked about before building a Facebook following can be a tough nut to crack without paying for advertisements or giveaway prizes. One thing we all have to make sure of is that if Facebook offers us something for free that we can use to our advantage, we jump all over it.
There was one thing that Facebook was offering that – until recently – we had been ignoring. When I realized my error, I hung my head in shame for one minute and then took steps to correct it. The thing I wasn't using properly was the Facebook fanpage picture.
This little tidbit of knowledge isn't widely known, but Facebook gives us quite a bit of latitude with our fanpage profile picture. We all have pictures on our fanpages, and most of them look like this.
Normal Facebook fanpage picture
There is nothing wrong with that page at all. Until a few days ago, ours looked just like it, just with 10,000 or so less fans. The "secret" that I stumbled upon was that Facebook gives you up to 180 x 540 pixels to use for your picture. If they're going to offer me that much real estate for free, I'm going to grab every last pixel!
I thought about doing it myself but then remembered that I have no artistic ability whatsoever. Anybody who has followed our website long enough will remember the old Damian's Oracle cover that I designed a year ago and agree with me! ;) I sent the photo specs to Lizzy and she sent them to our cover artist, Dafeenah, who came up with this:
Full size Facebook fanpage picture
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The image really draws your eyes to it and sets your page apart from a lot of the others. I was very happy with the way it turned out. Adding a custom full length banner is an easy way to improve the look and feel of your page. I can also see us swapping out banners when we run special offers or giveaways in the future.
If you're handy with Photoshop, GIMP or some other graphics program then set the dimensions of your canvas size to 180 x 540 pixels and start designing your custom Facebook fanpage picture. I emailed our graphic artist Dafeenah yesterday telling her that I was going to write this article and begged her to create a Fiverr.com gig to make these banners for people. If you're like me and you want a great looking banner but you don't trust yourself to do it, then you can check out her Fiverr.com gig and have one professionally made for five dollars.
Regardless of if you make it yourself or have someone make it for you, as soon as you have one, post it here so we can check it out! I can't wait to see what ideas creative people come up with for their own Facebook fanpage picture. And as always, please feel free to post any questions or comments.
