Facebook Pages: Customize

As we’ve seen, it’s quick and easy to set up a Facebook presence but it will look like every other Facebook Page. In this section, we’ll show you how to customize the appearance of your Page and highlight important content.

Customizing your Facebook Page

The default Page that Facebook creates can work fine ‘out of the box’. But if you want to give your Page a professional edge, help it stand out from the crowd, and improve its performance, it’s worth doing some basic customization. The most important ones are:

Cover image
Profile picture
Custom tabs and apps

Here’s what a customized Page looks like. We’ve highlighted each of these elements.

Click to enlarge image

We’ll focus here on two things:

Improving the visual impact of your Page
Highlighting your important posts

We’ll take a closer look at tabs and apps (highlighted in red above) in the next section. These add advanced capabilities to your Facebook Page but you can produce an effective Page without them.

Add a cover image

The most prominent way to ‘brand’ your Facebook Page is by adding a cover image (highlighted in yellow above). To do this, click the ‘Add a cover’ button that displays when you login as an administrator.

Facebook sends all visitors to the same default home page. In the past, Facebook allowed you to create a fully customized home page that looked nothing like Facebook but its recent revamp stopped this practice so every visitor gets the same Facebook experience.

Click for tips on Facebook covers

Given the cover image’s prominence and importance, you might want to employ some professional design talent. Here are some things you’ll need to know.

The image size is 851 x 315 px. Facebook will resize images that don’t conform to this so make sure the proportions of any image you upload will match.
You can change your image regularly, for instance to highlight the latest books you’re promoting.
Beware of infringing Facebook’s strict rules around cover images which limit the cover’s promotional uses. For instance, you can’t include price promotions, references to where to buy it, or calls to action such as ‘get it now’ or even Facebook’s own ‘Like this page’.

Check Facebook’s latest Page guidelines before you design your cover image (facebook.com/page_guidelines.php).

Choose a suitable profile picture

The profile picture is an important part of your Page’s branding.

It has a prominent place on the home page, and it’s used beside all of the posts you make on your Page and when commenting on other pages.

To change it, hover over the image and click the ‘Edit profile picture’ button.

Click for tips on profile pictures

Here are some useful tips for creating a profile picture:

The image is 180 x 180 px and will be resized to fit if required. Make sure your image is square to avoid distortion.
The image is also resized to 32 x 32 px to use as a thumbnail on other parts of Facebook, so check that your image will also work in this very small size.
You can change this image regularly so that, for instance, you can post as the cover image of your latest book. But you’ll need to think carefully about how this will work with your overall branding if you use this approach.

Highlight important posts on your timeline

To pin a post, hover over it with the mouse, click on the pencil icon and select ‘Pin to Top’.

You’ll want to draw special attention to some posts. Here are three useful ways to highlight some posts and add further interest to your Page.

1. Pinning

Pinning lets you create a ‘sticky’ post which stays in the top left position of your Page’s timeline for up to a week. You can pin any post. When you’re logged in as an administrator, just hover over it with your mouse, click on the pencil icon and select ‘Pin to Top‘. You can only pin one post at a time.

2. Highlighting

Highlighting lets a post stand out by making it double-width so it spans the whole page. You can highlight as many posts as you like. To highlight a post, hover the mouse over it, and click the asterisk in the top right corner.

3. Milestones

Milestones let you create posts to record special events such as sales milestones, book launches and so on. A milestone includes a photo (843 pixels wide and 403 pixels high) and some text which is presented full width on your Page in date order. You create a milestone post by clicking the Event/Milestone+ tab on the status box and adding the image and details.

Putting it into practice

Now it’s time to take what we’ve learned and cast a critical eye over some real examples to see how publishers, authors and others are using Facebook Pages.

We’ll then turn to building a Facebook Page of our own.