6 Tips for Designing Highly Effective Facebook Cover Photos

Your Facebook photo represents a huge piece of real estate on your Facebook page, yet many businesses flat out waste it. In this post, we’ll discuss several key tips for designing a highly effective cover photo for your Facebook page. How to design good Facebook cover photos 1. Drip and Bootea are two of many companies effectively using cover photos to achieve an objective. However, regardless of what objective you’re trying to accomplish, you should always stay on brand with your cover photo. So how do you stay on brand when designing cover photos? Secondary elements Almost every business uses of brand colors and fonts. The next important element of contrast is size. Because there is so much white space (in fact that’s all there is), your eyes are immediately drawn into the text. Finally, you want to utilize some key design principles like contrast and white space to make sure your cover photo really nails it.

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6 Tips for Designing Highly Effective Facebook Cover Photos | Hootsuite Blog

How much thought did you put into your last Facebook cover photo?

If you’re like most small business owners, you probably didn’t put much thought into it at all, which is a shame.

Your Facebook photo represents a huge piece of real estate on your Facebook page, yet many businesses flat out waste it.

Not only should your cover photo look nice, but it should also serve a purpose and represent your brand properly. In this post, we’ll discuss several key tips for designing a highly effective cover photo for your Facebook page.

Let’s get started.

Bonus: Download a free cheat sheet to quickly find the best image sizes for every social network and learn how you can use Hootsuite to easily add them to any post.

How to design good Facebook cover photos

1. Pick an objective for your cover photo

Believe it or not, a cover photo can be more than just a logo slapped onto a plain colored background.

While they can be great for branding purposes, cover photos can also help you achieve other business goals. This could be driving signups for your product, advertising a sale, or promoting an upcoming webinar.

Take a look at marketing and automation tool Drip from Leadpages’ cover photo.

You can see there’s a clear objective here and that’s to drive registrations for their free training. They’ve accomplished this while still keeping their branding intact and showing a glimpse of the product’s capabilities.

6 Tips for Designing Highly Effective Facebook Cover Photos | Hootsuite Blog
Image via Drip from Leadpages on Facebook.

Another great example is Bootea.

6 Tips for Designing Highly Effective Facebook Cover Photos | Hootsuite Blog
Image via Bootea on Facebook.

As you can see, they’re not wasting any real estate here. Instead, they’re smartly using their Facebook cover to promote a brand new product. This is highly effective since there’s a “Shop Now” call to action directly below the cover image.

Drip and Bootea are two of many companies effectively using cover photos to achieve an objective. The takeaway here is that you should put a bit of thought into what you want your Facebook cover to accomplish.

2. Size your cover photo correctly

There are three things that are certain in life: death, taxes, and Facebook changing their layout.
Evidently, one of the things that gets impacted whenever Facebook changes their layout is the cover photo itself. For this reason you need to stay on top of things and make sure that you’re always using the proper dimensions.

At the moment, the Facebook cover photo displays at 820 x 312 pixels on desktop screens. On smartphones, it displays at 640 x 360 pixels. As a result, you may want to consider keeping key pieces of your cover photo centered so they don’t get cropped off on mobile.

While Facebook states that your cover photo can be a minimum of 399 x 150 pixels, I don’t recommend using a resolution lower than what Facebook displays your cover photo at on desktops.

6 Tips for Designing Highly Effective Facebook Cover Photos | Hootsuite Blog

For more information and additional social media sizes, make sure to check out this social media image reference guide.

3. Stay on brand

We mentioned that a cover photo shouldn’t always be a company’s logo slapped on a background and this is true. However, regardless of what objective you’re trying to accomplish, you should always stay on brand with your cover photo. In fact, you should aim to create a social media style guide for your entire online presence.

So how do you stay on brand when designing cover photos?

Here are a few things to keep in mind.

Color palette

Whenever possible, always try to include your brand colors. As users continue to interact with your brand, you’ll become more ingrained in their mind provided that you remain consistent with your branding elements.

Blue is a primary color in our brand kit at Snappa, so it’s no surprise we use it for our cover photo. When users visit our website, they’re met with the exact same shade of blue.

6 Tips for Designing Highly Effective Facebook Cover Photos | Hootsuite Blog
Image via Snappa on Facebook.

Fonts and typefaces

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