branding facebook pages

Advertising on Facebook with the Photoviewer – Part 3

Once you realize that the thumbnail image shown along the top photo strip row of the Facebook fan page is not identical to the larger image viewed when clicking on the thumbnail, a world of potential marketing and promotional opportunities presents itself. The trick is to make the photo strip image look pleasing AND to make the resulting larger image effective at whatever your goal is. In our case, we wanted the larger image to brand our company, Outskirts Press, and we wanted to offer some information about each package, along with a URL for purchase.

To accomplish all these goals, you have to know the image dimensions for the optimal large image and the dimensions for the interior space pre-determined by Facebook as the thumbnail portion. This is a little tricky because the larger image is optimal when it is square and the thumbnail image is optimal when it is rectangular. Complicating matters further is the fact that Facebook doesn’t take the precise CENTER of the larger image to generate the thumbnail image; it skews high.

Your full image should be 720 pixels wide by 720 pixels high at 72 dpi. The image for your thumbnail should fall into a space that is 535 pixels wide by 375 pixels high at 72 dpi. This “thumbnail” graphic should not be centered, but rather off-set 90 pixels from the top and 93 pixels from either edge. This leaves you with 255 pixels below the thumbnail image for marketing/promotional purposes — content that will ONLY be seen in the larger view. Use the bottom 190 pixels for optimal visuals, although you should also leave a blank strip approximatley 25 pixels high along the very bottom because this is where Facebook is going to add its “Like/Comment/Tag Photo” overlay boxes, and you don’t want that stuff interfering with your image.

Was that too confusing? Perhaps a graphic will help. If you follow the directions above, you’re left with a template that looks roughly like this:

Tomorrow we’ll see what our new “Diamond” package graphic looks like once we follow this template…

branding, Social Networking Sites

How to market on Facebook with the Photo strip – Part 2

In yesterday’s post I mentioned that the Facebook photo strip along the top of business fan pages offers a good branding opportunity and can also be used to effectively market or promote a product or service. Up until recently, we at Outskirts Press were only using the photo strips for the first part of that equation — branding. And we were losing the opportunity to market or promote when someone clicked on the image for a closer look.

Realizing the potential for what can be done with these images required first realizing that Facebook doesn’t “thumbnail” images in the traditional way. Typically, when an image is “thumbnailed” (meaning, made smaller), the thumbnail image is an exact duplicate of the “larger” image, just at a reduced size. But Facebook does something different, as seen by their use of the Profile Picture along the left-hand column, which also contains the square “avatar” picture. In other words, the Thumbnail for the Profile picture is NOT an exact duplicate of the image, but rather a pre-defined section of the larger image.

The Photo strip images work the same way. The thumbnail images shown along the top of the fan page are pre-determined sections of the larger version of the image that is viewed when the thumbnail is clicked. In fact, when an image is created correctly, the same image can be both a successful, “clean” thumbnail image AND a more promotional image.

For instance, with our 5 package graphics, I wanted to maintain the look and feel of the 5 gemstones in a row (shown below)…

… and at the same time, I wanted the user to see a more branded graphic for each package when viewing the larger image. I even wanted to include a “call to action.” All it took was determining the optimal image specs for both the “large” version of the graphic and the “thumbnail” portion of the same graphic.

And I’ll reveal what those settings are tomorrow…

branding, marketing, start-up

Facebook Photo Banner for Promotion and Marketing – Part 1

Those of you familiar with the Facebook Fan pages know that with the redesign that Facebook introduced at the beginning of this year came a 5-photo “photo strip” along the top of every Fan page. Our Facebook page for Outskirts Press used that strip to showcase the “icons” for our five publishing services, shown in the screen shot below:

I’ve mentioned on this blog in the past how that photo viewer strip allowed for a more aesthetic “branding” opportunity. For instance, in our case, Outskirts Press is often associated with the gemstone graphics, so placing those five graphics along the top row of our Facebook page worked well.

The problem is that when anybody clicks on any of those graphics, what they see doesn’t really MOTIVATE them to do much more. See below to see what I mean.

Not terribly compelling, is it? Next time we’re going to talk in more detail about how to modify those photo strip images so they work as promotional elements or advertising for the product or service your Facebook Fan page is about.

Social Networking Sites

Facebook Images

Continuing our discussion of branding various social networking and video sharing sites, I’d like to return to Facebook for a moment and touch upon a topic I briefly mentioned a few posts ago when I was discussing the new Facebook Page design and its new “branding graphic” specifications along the left-hand side:

In addition to the graphic along the left, I mentioned that the five image slots along the top also provide a branding opportunity if you manage the photographs correctly. This section of a Facebook page randomly presents the 5 most recent images uploaded into the main folder. In the case of Outskirts Press, this is ideal because we have five different publishing packages that are represented by five different gemstones. They add a splash of color and “interest” to what might otherwise be a normal, standard Facebook page.

The downside to this is that you have to prevent other users from uploading images. Another downside is that when you, as the page administrator, upload an image, it may disturb the “branding” efforts you have put forth. This is what happened with Outskirts Press on St. Patrick’s day when we offered a one-day “Search for the pot o’ gold” Internet search opportunity for a Facebook community, the prize being a book teaser video worth $99. We uploaded the image of the pot of gold that was within one of our YouTube Videos, and of course, as a result, that image also appeared as one of our top five images:

But that’s okay. If anything, the temporary “difference” to the Image Section brought even more attention to the one-day only St. Patrick’s Day event.

Interestingly, no one “won.” I don’t know if it was because the search was “too hard” or “too boring” but that’s always one of the fun things about running social networking events — you never know what is going to happen…

Social Networking Sites

When you grow as fast as Facebook, you are constantly tweaking “things” to improve them. The same thing happened (and is still happening) with us at Outskirts Press. Not that I’m comparing our growth to Facebook’s (I wish!) – but we have had quite a few “versions” of our website since it launched in 2002, and to this day we are constantly improving it.

For Facebook, every change they make has the potential to upset 500 million people. That’s a lot of pressure. Generally, people don’t like “change” very much. Even if, in the long run, a change is for the better, people are just more comfortable with the familiar. When transitioning to a new Facebook Pages layout, the Facebook folks offered an opportunity for people to proactively opt-in to the new design before enforcing the transition. Frankly, I’m not even sure when that “deadline” is, but we actively opted-in to the new design as soon as we could, and then started tweaking our Facebook Page layout to take advantage of some of the changes.

Aesthetically, the most noticeable difference is that the Facebook Pages now look nearly identical to Facebook Profiles. Some comment filters have been added (profanity filters, for example), and new dimensions are set for logos and other branding opportunities. While these variables are not yet as robust as those offered by YouTube (more on that in the near future), the new Facebook page does provide some branding opportunities for the creatively-minded.

The first thing you should do to “brand” your company page on Facebook is shorten the URL for it by creating a custom url (for example, www.facebook.com/OutskirtsPress, instead of facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789)

When this functionality first launched in 2009, Facebook required companies to have at least 1000 fans in order to create a custom URL. But now it appears to be available for Pages with as little as 25 fans. If you have that many fans, you can set a custom URL in your Settings.

The next thing to do is customize the logo box along the left-hand side. The profile image dimensions used to be 200 x 600 and are now 185 x 540. Yes, that means there is a chance you will need to resize or recreate your “old” graphic to optimize it for the new layout once that change is enforced.

At Outskirts Press, we’re in the process of branding all our social networks (or at least the four main ones we use: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and our blog on WordPress). This includes uploading graphics, logos, and summary statements that look the same and communicate the same message across all channels. For Facebook, this meant uploading a new profile image to take advantage of the new size dimensions offered by Facebook. This new graphic matches the front page of our website as well as online and offline advertisements we run. We call it our “Write Anything, Publish Everything, Market Everywhere” creative, or “write.publish.market” for short, which is our new tagline we introduced with the lauch of our new logo and new Version 4 website in 2010.

Facebook allows you to select a square portion of the new profile picture to create your “Avatar” so consideration has to be made to “kill two birds with one stone” so to speak, since successful Avatar images often are not the same as successful branding images. That is why our profile image contains both our new name treatment logo at the top and our “older” circular logo at the bottom – the latter being an element I wouldn’t otherwise have included in the profile graphic; but it is the Avatar we have built our social presence around and I’m not inclined to change it (at least, not now).

If you look closely at that screen shot above you’ll notice the cover image for Fandemonium (our Facebook anthology), which just published today, and it seemed fitting that we should announce that publication to our Facebook fans first. It’s not even available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble yet, but only through our bookstore at Outskirts Press (at a 10% discount, by the way).

And you’ll also notice images of our book publishing package icons (the gems) along the top of our new Facebook Page (another branding opportunity available on Facebook through “manipulation” of the images functionality). And I’ll discuss those topics next time…