How to upload a custom thumbnail for Facebook Live

In this video, I’m going to show you exactly how to change your Facebook Live video cover image so you can have a beautifully branded cover photo, instead of the unfortunate random image that Facebook chooses for you. Stay tuned.

Hi, I’m Sara Nguyen your Online Marketing Strategist, helping coaches, consultants, and creative pros, build and grow their businesses using social media with ease.

I love Facebook it’s a fantastic way of putting yourself out there so you can actually be seen by your audience and market your message. However, after you’ve broadcasted on Facebook Live, Facebook saves the video to the video section of your page and your timeline. They also display a random image still from your video and sometimes it’s not the most flattering image. So how do you change the image to something that is more optimized for that space, tells people who you are and portrays your brand in the way that you want to.

Let’s go over to my computer now and I’ll show you how.

So we’re currently on my Facebook Page in the “videos” tab so on the left-hand side. The videos tab is where Facebook puts your videos and your Facebook Live broadcasts. Now, you can see for some of them, I’ve already added a thumbnail and some of them I haven’t. Such as this one here where the random image is a half shot of my eyes, luckily I did some winged eyeliner for that day!

And this one is another one where they’ve put a random still. It looks ok, it’s not the worst one that they’ve chosen before, but how do we get it so that it’s something cute and more importantly, so that people can see what the video is about without having to read the text like this one here: “How to get clients with Facebook Live”, or this one here “Your Profile vs Pages”.

So I’m going to show you how to upload the image but first, you need to have an image. If you don’t have any graphic design skills and you’re not a designer and you need to create the image – Canva.com is a great tool to help you do that. It’s free they come with lots of templates in the correct size that you need, so all that you would have to do is to change the text and upload the images that you want.

I would start by going to “Facebook post” and once you open up “Facebook posts” on the left-hand side you’ll see that there are a bunch of templates here and you simply switch out the text and add the text that you want. You can upload your own images, you would simply click on upload and here you can see I’ve uploaded a few of my own and then simply drag it onto the image.

Here’s an image that I prepared earlier. Once I’m done editing it and changing it to how I want it to look I would click “download” and then I would get the option to save this file to my computer.

Once I’ve done that I can go back to my Facebook Page and click on the video that I want to change the thumbnail for. On the top right-hand corner here you can see very faint dots, you would click on that, click on “edit post” (they don’t make it easy Facebook!) and this will open up the section where you can change the thumbnail.

Now you can see here, they’ve got some stills and I get 10 stills that I can choose from and these are okay even though not all of them are flattering. The problem with your still is that people can’t tell from a glance what the video is about. That’s why you want to upload a thumbnail.

Now I’m going to click on “custom” and I’m going to choose the image that I saved earlier and created in Canva.com and that will upload it and I simply click “save” then go back to the video section I can see that the image is changed here.

If I’m not happy with the thumbnail and how it looks, I can change that using exactly the same process. I would click on the video, click on the three dots here, and click “edit post” which will allow me once again to upload another image using that “custom” button there, and once I’m done, I just simply click “save” and that will change the image for me.

If you found this video useful make sure to subscribe to my channel so you can stay updated with what’s working right now to help you get more leads and sales easily using social media. Also, make sure to grab a copy of my Facebook Live cheat sheets. In it is your quick start, step-by-step system on how to get up and streaming with Facebook Live with ease, I cover the essential equipment software and what to do before, during and after the broadcast – making your Facebook Live super simple and pain-free. To get your hands on it simply click on the link in description below. Thanks for watching.