I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve clicked on someone’s Facebook page only to be disappointed in their choice of cover photo. I’ve been disappointed not because the photos were particularly unattractive or inappropriate but because they aren’t the right size.
In most cases, you can’t just drop your blog or website header image into Facebook as your cover photo and have it work. Too many times, I’ve seen words or images cut off and for the life of me I cannot fathom why someone would deem that an appropriate representation of their brand. I don’t know about you but it turns me off to the point that I don’t even want to take the time to look at what they’re talking about. If you can’t take the time to make sure your cover photo, the first impression of you that I’m getting from your page, looks right, why should I (or anyone else) bother going any further?
Facebook offers this advice for selecting an appropriately sized cover photo –
What are the dimensions for my Page’s cover photo?
Cover photos are 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall. If you upload an image that’s smaller than these dimensions, it will get stretched to this larger size. The image you upload must be at least 399 pixels wide.To get the fastest load times for your Page, upload an sRGB JPG file that’s 851 pixels wide, 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes. For images with your logo or text-based content, you may get a higher quality result by using a PNG file.
Of course your Facebook Page cover photo isn’t the only place where size matters. LunaMetrics was kind enough to compile ‘The Ultimate Complete Final Social Media Sizing Cheat Sheet‘ to help us get the most bang for our photo-sizing buck across multiple social networking platforms. Now go out and resize those images!
