Sara Nguyen

Helping Sassy Solopreneurs Reach more people and get more clients

How to create a Facebook Cover Photo

Hey, you want a step by step guide on how to create a Facebook Cover Photo? In this video I’m going to show you how to set up your Facebook Cover Photo quickly and easily, stay tuned.

Hi I’m Sara Nguyen your Online Marketing Strategist helping you build your business using tech and social media with ease. If you’re new to this channel consider subscribing for all of the latest tech reviews, social media marketing tips and training. And, at any time during this video check out the description for links to all of the resources mentioned in the video.

Your Facebook cover photo is prime real estate on your Facebook page, it’s one of the first things that people see when they land on your page, so you want to make sure that you make the most of this space to communicate your message and to portray your brand in the best light. So let’s have a look at what you need to include in your Facebook cover photo.

So what should you include in the design of your cover photo? I typically recommend my clients include a graphic that represents your business and a call to action or your business tagline, and, if possible your logo as well. Facebook as some terms and conditions on what you can and can’t include in your Facebook cover photo. Your Facebook cover photo can’t infringe on anyone else’s intellectual property, so you need to make sure that you use images and photos that you have the right to use. So this means not using images that you find on Google Images and to make sure that you’ve either taken the photo yourself or you’ve purchased the rights to the photo. Your Facebook cover photo can’t be deceptive or misleading and you can’t encourage other people to upload your cover photo in their timelines.

So let’s have a look at some real world cover photos to give you some inspiration on what you can include in your cover photo. This is Learning English Essential’s cover photo and what’s included here is an image of an iPad with an arrow pointing to the sign-up button so a call to action, and they are encouraging you to get their free English conversation practice video and worksheet. There is also their tagline, “Learn English quickly easily and without overwhelm” they have also included their logo in the corner of the iPad image.

This is the cover photo for another Facebook page, The Space Inbetween with Sara Brooke, and on her cover photos she’s included images of some of her products which is another clever use of this space as well because once again remember we are using images that represents our business and she has some beautiful colors that are aligned to her logo and compliment her logo and it really brings out what she is all about, she’s got a tagline there, “Be your own healer sacred soul medicine tools”.

On Kris Car’s cover photo she has images relating to her product which is the Crazy Sexy Juice book, she as some text which explains what’s in it and a link to her website as well. The Link is not clickable but she has laid it out cleverly so it integrates with the call to action which is the sign up, and if you click on the sign up button it will take you to that website.

This is a simple cover photo that I like to use as an example from Grilled Fish and this showcases real fish which is what this Fish and Chippery actually sells. With your Facebook cover photo as long as you have  a really vivid image that represents your business it doesn’t necessarily have to be extremely elaborate and fancy it just needs to make the point and a really clear impression of what your business actually offers.

So how would you now go about creating your cover photo and profile image? Another way of getting your cover photo or profile image done is to do it yourself, and a great tool for being able to do this is with www.canva.com and I love Canva.com because it’s free and they have so many different layouts that you can really create a beautiful cover photo without having to know any design or having to layout money for a graphic designer.

So once you sign up to a Canva.com account you can click on cover photo and what you will see that Canva has on the left-hand side here is that they have a bunch of free templates that you use or if you hover over one of the layouts and it has this little $ sign that means that that will cost you money to use, but typically they’re about a $1 so it’s quite cheap to use there are premium templates and images as well, but if you don’t want to use that that’s fine you can click on one of the free ones and that will populate and then literally everything else becomes as easy as clicking on the item changing the text, you can upload your own images clicking on the upload section and lay them into the cover photo as well, and everything is literally dragged and dropped which is really really cool.

You can add different backgrounds, you can add different elements, so with the elements you can add shapes there are different shapes that you can use and drag them over, you can add text really easily, there are pre-mocked up text layouts or you can just add your own text and choose the text style yourself. You can change the font. Now you’re not able to upload your own custom fonts which is a bit of a shame and an oversight if you ask me, however, there are many fonts that Canva does allow you to use and it should be enough for what you need to do.

You can delete things if you make a mistake, once you’re happy with your design it’s as easy as clicking on the download button and for Facebook specifically you can save it has a high quality dot PNG format and that will work quite well for what we need to do which is upload it to our Facebook fan page. Canva will prepare the image and then you can go ahead and upload the image to your Facebook cover which we will show you next.

Now to create your Facebook profile image you would click on custom dimensions the width is 180 and the height is 180 and we want to make sure that the size is on PX which is Pixels and then we will click on design, Canva will then create the canvas and from here we can upload our own images and logos and then literally drag them over to the canvas like so. We can then resize them so that they fit the canvas properly and that’s it and it’s as easy as that. I’m going to download it again as a high quality PNG and Canva will prepare the file which I’m going to upload next.

Now to upload your cover photo what you want to do is go back to your Facebook page which we created, we want to click on the little icon here, click on add cover and upload the photo, so we are going to choose the image that we just downloaded from Canva or the image that your graphic designer as provided you, and then we are going to upload that and Facebook will position the image, you can move it if the image is a little bigger than the size that Facebook allows. And we are going to do the same to upload your profile image, we are going to upload a photo, choose the image we just created and that’s it and then we are going to save our changes and we are done.

So there you have it a step by step walk through of how to create your own Facebook cover photo, if you found this video useful give me a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel. If you’re looking for ways to build your business using Facebook make sure you grab a copy of my Facebook Live Cheat Sheets it’s a super simple guide to help you get up and streaming with Facebook Live even if you’ve never hit record before, to get your hands on it simply click on the link in the description below and thanks for watching.

 

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———Equipment Used To Shoot This Video ——-

Camera – Canon 80D

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Lens – Canon 18-55 Lens

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Blue Yeti Pro USB Microphone

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Microphone Rode Smart Lav+

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Microphone adaptor – Rode SC3 3.5mm TRRS to TRS Adaptor

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Rode extension cable: http://amzn.to/2lPjStl

Lighting – Halo Prismatic Ring light

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Tripod – Manfrotto Compact Advance

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This video edited with Screenflow 6 on a Mac

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DISCLAIMER: This video and description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission. This helps support the channel and allows us to continue to make videos like this. I only recommend products that I personally use and love. Thank you for the support!

In this Facebook tutorial,  Online Marketing Strategist Sara Nguyen shows you in easy to follow, step by step instructions how to create a Facebook cover photo using Canva.

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