Facebook: New Adventures in Cover Photos.

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Remember when we all groaned about timeline? I took the plunge early and made an effort to embrace the changes so that I could ease my page admins into it and help them avoid some confusion. I thought you might have needed a little assistance too so I blogged about cover art and easy ways to create it if you’re not a graphic artist. That blog is here. 

In that blog I summarized some of the initial guidelines from Facebook surrounding cover photos:

• No selling! Don't tell us about the latest deals here.
• It's meant to be visual so have fun with it. 
• Should be representative of your product or service.
• No pleas to people to let others know about your page.
• Don't include anything about asking them to share or like the page. 
• No URLs, emails or any info that leads them to another way to contact you.

Note: The bullets above are my words not the ones that were previously in the official Facebook guidelines. They were much more detailed than that! You get the idea though.

And cover photos started popping up quickly. I noticed immediately that no one was following “the rules”; there was plenty of copy being used and URLs, etc. And here’s the rub: I have never heard of anyone getting penalized for their non-compliance either! And now, Facebook has thought…what the heck; let’s loosen up a bit!

Here's an excerpt (actually it is most of it) from the Facebook cover art guidelines: All cover photos are public, which means anyone visiting your Page will be able to see the cover photo. Coverphotos can't be deceptive, misleading, infringe on anyone else's copyright or be in violation of the Pages Terms. You may not encourage people to upload your cover photo to their personal timelines.

This is fuzzy stuff! Do you understand WHY they had to reword it? I sure don’t. Is this rewording going to make the stockholders happy? No. Will it make the users happy? No. Will it make the page owners happy? They weren’t listening anyway.

Here we go again with my Facebook wishes. Excuse me while I get on my soapbox: Facebook pay attention to the users; pay attention to protecting our privacy. Let posts from us struggling business owners (like me) be seen! 

Give us an opportunity to grow with you instead of forcing us to work around you.

Taking precious time to rewrite guidelines that no one pays attention to provides no benefit to anyone. Rethink your priorities and your long term strategy. 

Speaking of covers, a certain band formed in New Jersey wanted to be on one for a well known magazine and sang about it at the end of 1972 (see below) and got their wish the following year! Don't forget to visit us at our website, or stop by on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.                       where we cover lots of great topics! 

Oh, That Facebook Cover Art!

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Current cover art for my personal profile, taken 2/23 

Gotta admit, I was rather frazzled when I switched to Facebook's Timeline for my personal profile. To keep things simple, I took a large photo of a sunset and slapped it  up on the top of the page. So what if it didn't fit; I wriggled it around a little and it was pretty decent.


But it's a different game entirely with pages. Why? Because one photo just won't cut it in order to properly represent what the page is all about. I'll use Groovy Reflections, one of my pages, as an example. 

Since there are six team members, I felt it should be a group effort with one photo from each of them representing what Groovy Reflections is all about. The brand logo would also be part of it, bringing the number of photos to seven. Furthermore, I wanted to add all our names to the artwork, since we are so behind the scenes. It's an opportunity to get our names out there to the fans; not enough fans make their way over to the website, where they'd find bios for each team member.

First cover for Groovy Reflections

And how I struggled with getting that artwork to fit, just like I struggled with the multi-photo cover for this Facebook page. A quick search would have revealed several sources stating that the dimensions should be 850 wide by 315 in height. That's pixels we're talking about!

Upon discovering the official dimensions, the task just became easier! 

And, here's a few more guidelines about cover art:

• No selling! Don't tell us about the latest deals here.

• It's meant to be visual so have fun with it. 

• Should be representative of your product or service.

• No pleas to people to let others know about your page.

• Don't include anything about asking them to share or like the page. 

• No URLs, emails or any info that leads them to another way to contact you.

If you're creating your own cover art and don't use Photoshop or another graphic software, try using PowerPoint. Later versions have plenty of tools for creating visual splendor. As a rough measure, the art should be about half of the size of a slide (see pic below). 

Approx size of cover art when using PowerPoint

If you're a veteran at putting together a slide show for all those important presentations, this is not all that difficult to do. 

You may want to change your Facebook cover art often, maybe every two weeks or every month so that the fans get into the habit of stopping by to see what's new. This is easy if you are a product-oriented company, since you can highlight various products, however, with a service, you may want to:

• Use seasonal photos

• Photos of things that hold interest for you but help define the brand and who you are

• Include your logo

• Have a photo of you or your team included

• Include a photo of your office or the building

• If you're a local business, photos of places around town

The possibilities are endless! Be creative, remember that the size is 830 X 315, and use a rainbow of color! Enjoy this tune by the Rolling Stones: Click here.