When Facebook introduced new Timeline in March this year, the Facebook business page owners and marketers worried about the loss of the profile banners which have been widely used to promote businesses and display calls to action. While many are now using cover photo for such purposes it is against Facebook guidelines to display calls to action, contact details, price or purchase information or any Facebook features, such as “Like us” on you cove r photo.
If you are one of these people, you are risking your Facebook business page to be shut down. Imaging what would it mean for you to lose all you worked so hard for?
I know it’s frustrating that such prominent place, as the cover photo is, cannot be used as advertising space. But if you think about the purpose of Facebook, you will soon see why Facebook banned such use.
Having said that, there are ways how you can utilise cover photo to your benefits. You can either use it for your identification, promotion and direction of your visitors.
Identification
Cover photo is ideal to present your brand’s story or even products. Think about how you want visitors of your Facebook business page to recognise you, what do you want to be known by.
The key is to build up recognition of your brand. Once visitors become familiar and comfortable with your brand and your products, they will become your fans, customers and even brand advocates.
Promotions
Remember, calls to action are strictly forbidden but that doesn’t stop you from promoting your products, events, sale or discounts. Think of cover photo as a billboard, your prime advertising space, just without explicit mentioning prices or calls to action. You can still be creative, catchy and entertaining.
Direction
This strategy is useful if you want to draw your visitors’ attention to your custom tabs. While you cannot directly direct them using call to action phrases such as ‘enter competition’, ‘click on tab’, ‘sign-up’ or similar, you can direct them with a clever design of your cover photo that will draw visitors’ eyes to that section of your Facebook business page.
Whatever strategy you are currently using make sure you try others as well. Then test them to see which one engaged better with your audience. In marketing, testing is the most important part. Make sure you set up measurable objectives of your strategies, so that you will be able to objectively measure your results. If you don’t test, you will never know what works and want doesn’t. This might result in investing your energy, money and time doing wrong strategies.
So what’s not allowed in a cover photo:
- Calls to action;
- your contract information; e.g. phone number, website, email address…
- price or purchase information;
- reference to any Facebook features / actions e.g. “Like our page”
Facebook Cover photo should not:
- infringe any 3rd party intellectual property,
- be false, misleading or deceptive.
What is allowed is it that you use a space of 851x351pixels for promotion of your brand, your story, you product for engagement with your clients, brand recognition and sometimes just pure entertainment.
And if this article opened up your creativity or if you are using some other Facebook cover photo strategies, why not share them with others in comments below.