As we all know social media has exploded in terms of it being a very crucial part of your search engine marketing strategy. I have asked Marco from MDO Studio who’s been very successful in customizing, branding, and designing Facebook Fan Pages to talk a little bit about how you can customize your own Facebook fan page very easily.
Why Create A Facebook Fan Page?
One quick glance at Facebook’s statistics and it’s easy to realize why your business needs to have its own Facebook fan page. With over 400 million active users, Facebook is the number 2 most visited website on the entire World Wide Web! There are more than 3 million active Pages on Facebook. More than 20 million people become fans of Facebook Fan pages each day. Moreover Fan pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans! Even more important, Facebook Fan pages offer businesses a way of interacting with their fans in a way that was unthought-of just a few years ago. Fan pages offer a place where you can listen to your fan-base, engage in a dialog, ask and answer questions, advertise special offers, drive traffic to your main site, promote your brand and so much more.
Facebook does a pretty good job of keeping all fan pages looking very consistent, effectively limiting the way business pages are laid out, their color palettes and overall design. One area where creativity and freedom can flow with some restraint is the profile picture.
Facebook Profile Picture Size – Customizing
The profile picture is an area located on the top left of all Facebook pages. The maximum Facebook profile picture size is 200 x 600 pixels. Bigger images are resized proportionally to fit these dimensions. While some people would find the constraint of these dimensions limiting, there are very imaginative web designers that have found truly creative solutions that integrate very well the profile picture size with the entire Facebook page layout. You can use this key piece of real estate to its full advantage by adding logos, slogans, descriptions, contact information, URLs, etc. Unfortunately you can’t add any hyperlinks to your Facebook profile picture, but you can definitely communicate your message in that space.
Working with thumbnails in Facebook is a little bit trickier and a lot more limiting than custom profile pictures. The dimensions for the Facebook thumbnail size are set at 50 x 50 pixels. When customizing your thumbnail, Facebook lets you move the selected area for the thumbnail up, down, right or left but always keeping the pre-selected width / height proportions the same. It’s almost like looking at a shrunk version of the profile picture through a window: only that boxed area will be shown as the thumbnail. There are logos that look perfect on the profile picture but don’t fit the thumbnail area, and designers have to get really creative in order to have a profile picture and thumbnail combination that looks good and makes sense. Sometimes a client’s logo will not be the best option for a thumbnail picture, because at a 50 x 50 pixel size, they may become unrecognizable.
Take a look at these custom profile pictures for Facebook fan pages. Some of these communicate a great deal at first glance about services provided, contact information, etc.; while others have integrated their profile picture with Facebook’s design very well.
Customizing your profile picture may not sound like much, but it definitely can make your business stand out, communicate what your company does, push your contact information and promote your brand. On the second part of this article I will discuss the FBML application, custom tabbed pages and wall tabs.
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