Creating cover photos for your social media pages

   

 

Are you proud of your social media cover photos? Do you want to find out how to improve them? Your cover photo is the first thing anyone sees when they visit your social media profiles. Make that first impression a positive one.

Pay attention to dimensions

When Facebook introduced the cover photo and Google+ followed suit. The large, banner-sized cover photos allow companies to express their online persona or reflect their established branding.

When it comes to cover photo perfection for brands and organizations, there’s more to good design and layout than just finding a beautiful image and saving it.

Repurposing art without customizing it may work in some rare cases, but you run the risk of ending up with cover photo elements that stretch beyond the image boundaries.

Using the recommended image size for your cover photo, no matter which platform you’re on, is key. Proper sizing ensures the image works best within the space—and with an overlapping profile photo. You want to be sure your image doesn’t look distorted or cut off.

If you’re designing a Facebook cover photo, the recommended size is 851 x 315 pixels. The minimum dimensions you can use are 339 x 150 pixels.

Ideally, a Google+ cover photo should be 1080 x 608 pixels, but it can be up to 2120 x 1192 pixels. The smallest image you can use is 480 x 270 pixels.

As for Twitter, they have a single recommended size: 1500 x 500 pixels.

LinkedIn’s hero image has a recommended size of 1400 x 425 pixels.

Use consistent brand colours

Your cover photo takes up a lot of real estate on your profile. Because of that, it needs to work seamlessly with the rest of your branding.

If the colours in your cover photo don’t match your website logo colours, your page can look disjointed. Visitors may think you don’t care about your social media presence.

Change images often

Changing your cover photo takes very little effort—usually just a few clicks. Because it’s that easy, it makes sense to change your photo to complement or highlight current promotions, the season or an upcoming local event.

Focus on fans

When it comes to social media, it’s all about your community. Therefore, having fan-sourced images in your cover photos can be the perfect way to connect.

Outsourcing vs digital tools

Clearly, simply knowing the dimensions for each cover photo isn’t sufficient. If you want to use the cover photo feature to help convey your business brand and message, some skill and effort needs to be put toward creating a professional looking graphic.

If you can, hiring a professional designer is the preferred route to go. These are graphic elements that should be considered business assets, and a critical part of your social media marketing strategy. The cover photo is an image that will help communicate who you are and what you can do for potential customers, and is therefore vitally important. And a designer can do so much more than create a graphic that fits these requirements. A skilled designer understands the importance of color and layering and positioning. They can bring a trained eye to the use of fonts and text and images so that every element of the graphic communicates to the viewer very specifically and deliberately.

If you need to create graphics for yourself, but are not or cannot hire a professional designer, my recommendation is to use Canva.com. With Canva, you can create gorgeous looking graphics very inexpensively. The tool itself is free to use; only some of the stock images will cost you if you choose to use them. If you aren’t familiar with the tool, I highly recommend that the first thing you do once you’ve created your account is to run through the tutorials. You can get through all of them in about an hour, and doing so will not only familiarize yourself with the tool and your design options, but also give you some great ideas and design tips that you can apply to your new graphic.

Once you’re ready to begin, at the top of the home page are template sizes for various kinds of graphics. Some of the social networks are represented, but the easiest thing to do is to choose Custom and simply enter the dimensions above for whichever social network you’re starting with. That will present you with a blank canvas, perfectly sized, on which to begin creating your new social media cover photo.

–socialmediaexaminer.com and thesocialmediahat.com