How do I make my Facebook Page Profile picture more exciting?

This is a topic that many people struggle with. The easy option with your profile picture is just to put your logo in the space and be done with it… As demonstrated here by SmartCompany:

However, this image just does NOT do your page justice. Think of your profile picture as the first impression. When you haven’t met someone before you want to look your best, you want to look hot/sexy/professional/friendly, etc depending on the occasion. Your profile picture is the same, use it to express something about your business, tell people a bit more information, you ARE more than just a logo – well I hope you are!

So if you are SmartCompany.com.au what can you do? Well, how about a screen shot of the website, or some information on what the site is about, some images of the latest people who have been interviewed – get the picture?

Remember you can update this image as often as you like – think of Google’s home page, they change it for Halloween, for Christmas, Easter, etc. You can too. If you have a big event coming up then change your picture to promote it, if you have a new range of products coming out then feature them in the picture.

The space that Facebook gives you for the profile picture is 180 pixels wide by 540 pixels high, if this sounds like design speak that you don’t get, don’t worry, Facebook will resize your image to fit it into the space.

Now we aren’t all graphic designers, and often we can’t afford or don’t have time to get someone else to produce a profile picture for us, especially if you are changing it regularly, so I will let you into a little secret… it’s called PowerPoint! What you need to do, is get however many individual pictures you want for your profile picture and arrange them how you would like them to appear on the final image. Now select all the images and group them together, right click “save as a picture” to save the image as a jpeg (it MUST be a jpeg) and upload it to your Facebook page. Simple.

Here is the image I use on my Brand New Day Facebook Page, it’s pretty simple, but also very impactful, partly because it’s bigger than the SmartCompany one, but also it contains more colours and is in general more interesting to look at, although of course I am a little bias!

I hope after reading this you are now opening PowerPoint, selecting images and making your profile picture MUCH more exciting, to be honest I am rather bored seeing all the logos out there. In fact, I have changed the profile picture on my Facebook Page, that’s how bored I got!

So tell me in the comments what you’ve done about your profile picture, or better still send me the link to the page so I can look for myself.

Ed:Thanks for bringing this up, Lara. Rest assured we’re now working on it! 

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks, mobile phone socks www.MyMocks.com, founder of Social Rabbit – your guide in the world of social media www.Facebook.com/SocialRabbit and author of ‘Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business’. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.