Getting the Most Out of Your Business’s Social Media Banner & Profile Picture

It’s important for any business to maintain as many profiles across as many social media platforms as possible, giving your business added visibility and availability.

I’m here to give you a few tips on how to optimize your Facebook Banner/Profile Picture combination to its fullest marketing potential.

1) Keep it consistent.

Your profile photo and Facebook banner should match up in some way. The more visibly coherent the social media profile, the more consistent the message. Additionally, cleverly aligned of banners and profile pictures are a wonderful way to display the ingenuity and intelligence of your company.

2) Again, Keep it Consistent.

The color scheme and branding should all match up with your company’s website. You want to make yourself memorable by consistently assigning your business with a certain color scheme, font choice, and image. This also helps make your business more accessible when clients are searching for you.

4) Let the profile photo and the banner should work together like a billboard

Think of people cruising the internet as if they were cars down an interstate and your Facebook page is a billboard. You need to grab their attention quickly, get your logo across in a cohesive, coherent manner and not overload them with information.

An effective model is to have your profile picture be the logo and the banner be a punchy related image, with you name in one of the two. The reason I say let the profile photo be your logo is because when a user searches for a company, the profile photo comes up first, not the banner. Leave the contact information for the contact information section. This simple model is extremely effective.

Again, think of people’s attention span for your Facebook as cars on the interstate passing a billboard.

5) Avoid using stock photos and clip art in your profile photo and banner

Not only is this cheesy and unprofessional, it is also confusing for potential clientele. Using an image that is not personally associated with your business is not good branding. Clip-art may seem like an easy way to brand your company, but clip-art is by definition general. Additionally, you have now wedded yourself to an image that  does not change scale well or lend itself to manipulation. Stock photos and clip-art will lead you down a pixelated and garbled path.

6) Don’t be redundant

Do not have the same image for your profile picture as your banner. Additionally, if your logo is in your profile photo, it is not necessary to repeat that information in the banner. Giving clients the same information repeated in the same visual space is not informative, it’s just uncreative.
To repeat (….get it?), if your contact information is clearly in the contact information section of your page, it may not be necessary to repeat that information in the banner. A more effective use of advertising space is to use the banner as a colorful backdrop with added visual information. I repeat.

That being said, a simple, clearly placed phone number or larger formatting of your company name in the banner certainly won’t hurt. Just don’t have your address, url, phone number all in the banner. This is clutter.

Unless your profile photo is cleverly blended to be a part of your banner, do not make the two images too similar in coloring and layout. The images should complement each other. There is a fine line between cohesive and redundant.

7) Maintain your profile images

If your website design or any of your branding changes, makes sure to change it on your social media profile. A social media profile is only as useful as it is up-to-date.

8) Don’t forget to format.

All of this advice is useless if your images does not fit the format . Make sure you know what the optimal sizes and resolution  for your social media  images  down to the last pixel. For example, a Facebook banner is supposed to be 851 x 315 pixels. If you have a “Like Us Here” quote in your banner, make sure it directly lines up over the Like button.