Hey friends,

I want to share some insight I learned while working on my Facebook page. I’m certainly not the biggest Facebooker, but I recognize that it has an important place in any businesses’ presence. A lot of people are using Facebook to advertise their business, sell goods, and promote their events.

It’s important to have a strong header for your Facebook page. This is the first thing that your customer’s eyes will be drawn towards, and it’s an impression that will stick with them. Here’s mine:

What I’ve tried to focus on is something that is clean and professional, and quickly identifies what you can hire me for.

Okay so this looks fairly nice. What’s I learned through this process is that Facebook cuts the edges of your photo off when you view it on mobile. Originally I had played with using the logo on the edges of the frame, but this looked terrible on mobile. So here’s the solution:

The Facebook recommended specifications for headers are 820 pixels wide by 312 pixels tall. This gets converted to 640 wide and 360 tall on mobile. This is important because apparently the statistics say that over 50% of users view a business page on mobile. Presentation is key, so let’s make sure our image looks nice for our users.

Here’s the steps in Photoshop:

1) Create a new document that has the dimensions - 1640 x 624 (I like to make it larger and crop in after)

2) Post your photo and media content.

3) View > Rulers. If your rulers are not in pixels. go to Edit > Preferences > Unit & Rulers > and change Rulers to “Pixels”.

4) Now you can drag guides from the rulers on the top and side. Use these to make your frame for your mobile content.

5) Your operating box for mobile should be focus area should be about 1280 pixels wide.

6) Now that you have your guidelines you can adjust your content so that the important parts aren’t cut off on mobile.

7) I recommend making a second Facebook page that you can use as a dummy account to test uploads. Make sure it is set to private so that nobody can find it. Once it’s ready, upload your photo and view it on your desktop and mobile device. If it doesn’t look how you want it to, go back to photoshop, make your adjustments, and try again!

It’s a finicky process but after some trial and error you should be able to make something that works on any device your customers use.

Here’s two websites that I came across that while working on this and helped me set mine up. The first one has some great tips on how to optimize your header and make it more marketable. The second one is another approach on how to size and optimize.

Best of luck!

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/facebook-cover-photo-size-best-practices

https://louisem.com/52407/facebook-cover-photo-mobile-template

Facebook image specifications:

https://www.facebook.com/help/125379114252045