Thursday Tutorials: Setting Your Cover Photo

There are lots of ways to customize your page and tweak things - so many that going into them all at once might be overwhelming.  Instead, we'll take a section each week, alternating between how to do things mentioned in Tuesday Tips, to review in Tutorials.

This week, we're going to look at setting up your cover photo.  A cover photo is, by no means, required, but is a nice addition to pages.  For example, if you have a bigger logo that you can use for the cover photo and an abbreviation you use an avatar, you'd use the logo as your cover photo while the abbreviation design as your avatar.  Or if you have a store front, you could put your logo as your avatar and a nice storefront picture as your cover photo.

So to get started, click on the "Add Cover Photo" button on the left hand side.  When you mouse over it, you'll see this text here.

Once you click on "Add A Cover" this text box will pop up before you can go any further:

Once you click "Okay" you are taken back to your main page where you can once again click on the "Add a Cover".  This time you are given options to select a photo or upload a photo, as seen below.

I ended up choosing the "Upload a Photo" Option.  Though if you, or another admin, have uploaded cover photos in the past and you want to choose from photos you have uploaded, chose the first one, then it will take you to your uploaded photos for the page to select from.  The second option will give you the typical find file window.  Navigate to your image and select it and it will upload.

Note: Cover photos are supposed to be 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall.  If you upload a file larger than this, Facebook will attempt to resize it appropriately.  The smallest image dimensions that will work for a cover photo is 399 pixels wide and 150 pixels tall.  More information can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/help/125379114252045 .   These dimensions apply to pages as well as cover photos for personal profiles.

I uploaded a free cover image, appropriate to my page, found here:  http://www.coverphotoed.com/photo/facebook-like

Once uploaded and processed, it will appear like this.

In this screen, you can adjust the image if it's not how you want it to appear, moving left, right, up or down till it's how you want it. Once you are done, click "Save Changes" and it will take you back to your page with the new cover photo in place with everything else, as seen below:

If you have a graphic designer on your team, I strongly encourage allowing them to create, upload and adjust the photo so it works well with your avatar.  If you don't have a graphic designer and aren't good with making them yourself (or are in a rush), you can find a number of free cover photos online.  Check out these sites (I found these just by googling "free facebook page covers".  My cover for this page that I uploaded comes from CoverPhotoed.

1. https://www.facebook.com/freecoverphotos
2. http://www.pagemodo.com/welcome/cover-photos  - helps you create your own cover photos too.
3. http://profilerehab.com/facebook_home
4. http://www.coverphotoed.com/

There are many sites out there, just be sure to read through their stuff and make sure it's okay for pages to use.

Hope this is helpful to some!

Thursday Tutorials are a series of tutorials designed to help people who may not be as Facebook savvy as other people.  Some tutorials will be targeted towards newbies to the social media world, others will include tutorials for more advanced users.  Thursday Tutorials are written for the layman and are designed with everyone in mind.  You can find all the Thursday Tutorials by clicking on the Thursday Tutorials tag below.