6 Tips to Improve Your Facebook Page

By Scott Ayres
Published May 20, 2014

Do you want a highly effective Facebook page?

Do you know which elements make up a good Facebook page?

While there are an unlimited number of strategic factors that can contribute to the success of a Facebook page, many share common elements.

In this article you’ll discover the six elements of successful Facebook pages and how you can improve your Facebook page.

When Facebook users land on your page, you want them to figure out who you are and what you do in about 3 seconds. That’s why a good cover photo is important.

Here’s a good example from Coca-Cola.

There’s no misunderstanding what brand this cover image represents.

Thankfully, Facebook has seriously relaxed the rules regarding cover photos. The current guidelines are the only rules to date (these are subject to change):

All cover images are public. This means that anyone who visits your page will be able to see your cover image.Covers can’t be deceptive, misleading or infringe on anyone else’s copyright.You may not encourage people to upload your cover to their personal timelines.

The 20% text rule doesn’t apply to cover images, so there’s no restriction on including prices or calls to action. Even so, I advise against filling your cover full of unneeded text. The simpler, the better.

Tips for Cover Images

Make sure your cover images are high quality. Use an image that is at least 851 x 315 pixels. Facebook will expand any image that’s smaller than these dimensions and that makes your cover blurry.

Smaller images stretched to fit cover dimensions will appear blurry, like this.

Only use images and text that relate to your brand, services or products. For example, if you sell boats, don’t use images of trucks.

To avoid a stale page appearance, change your cover in conjunction with the seasons, holidays or events that make sense for your brand.

If you don’t have professional image editing software, here are some free and paid tools to help you create a great cover image:

While your cover photo gives users who land on your Facebook page their first impression, it’s your profile photo they’ll see the most.

Unless they visit your timeline again, all they’ll see from you branding-wise is your profile photo on the news feed.

Your profile pic is more important than the cover photo because it appears in:

The news feed of your followersPosts on your page’s timelineReplies in commentsComments and posts you make on other pages while using your pageOver the cover photo on your timeline

Tips for Profile Pics

Rectangular images must be cropped as square to upload as a profile pic so it’s best to use a square image.

ShortStack’s profile pic was designed to fit a square space.

Your profile pic is uploaded at 180 x 180 pixels, but displayed at 160 x 160 pixels. Check to make sure the smaller image still looks good, like this one from ShortStack.

ShortStack’s profile pic is easily recognizable at any size in the news feed.

As the news feed of your followers is the highest visibility for your profile pic, you should design your profile pic for that location; profile pics are resized to 100 x 100 pixels in a fan’s news feed, to 86 x 86 pixels next to posts on your timeline, and 43 x 43 pixels next to comments. Again, check to make sure your image is recognizable at news feed or timeline location.

An incomplete or misconfigured About section could result in missed traffic and likes on your page.

Be aware that this section will look slightly different, depending on the category you choose when you create your page.

Poco Auto & Tire is a “Local Business” with a physical location, so its About section includes address, contact information and business hours.

Example of what shows in the About section of a page in the Local Business category.

If you don’t have a physical location or it’s not common for people to come to your place of business, select a category such as “Company” or “Brand” when you create your page.

Example of what shows in the About section of a page in the Company or Brand categories.

Choosing either of these options lets Facebook show your short description under the profile pic on your timeline. And that description can include a hyperlink to your website!

Tips for Your Short Description

Regardless of the category you choose during page setup, you should complete every field you can because portions of the About section show up under the profile pic on your timeline for desktop viewers.

To edit the short description for company or brand pages, click on Edit Page in the admin panel, and then Update Page Info. From here, click on the pencil icon next to Short Description.

Add your URL to your Short Description.

Type in your URL at the beginning, so it’s the first thing people see.

You get 155 characters to tell people who you are, but I recommend using no more than 100; be clear and concise, and don’t stuff in keywords.

Sometimes the About section shows differently on the Facebook mobile app than it does on the desktop.

This is ShortStack’s page on a desktop:

Shortstack’s description in the Facebook desktop view.

And this is how the page appears on my Facebook mobile app:

ShortStack’s page viewed on a mobile phone.

Notice the difference in the descriptive text?

Here’s another example. This is the Social Media Examiner Facebook page viewed on my phone. The desktop view can be found above in the first portion of this subhead.

Social Media Examiner’s page viewed on a mobile phone.

On my Android device, the About section of ShortStack’s page is displaying the information in the Mission section.

ShortStack’s mission shows in the About section on mobile views.

The Social Media Examiner page shows me their Company Overview information.

Social Media Examiner’s Company Overview text shows on mobile views.

My best guess is that because ShortStack hasn’t filled out their Company Overview section, the mobile app is defaulting to their Mission section.

I suggest making sure your Short Description, Mission and Company Overview all begin with your URL so it shows first when someone visits your page on a mobile device.

Be sure to see how your page shows on all mobile devices.

Some people argue that third-party apps on Facebook pages are useless since Facebook doesn’t allow a default landing page and because app tabs aren’t shown when viewing a page on the mobile app.

But apps can be used to support a wide variety of goals.

Tips for Third-Party App Use

Let people sign up for your newsletter without leaving Facebook.

Collect more email addresses by using a contest app to give users an incentive to enter their email address in exchange for the chance to win a prize.

Cross-promote your other social channels by using an app to include content from Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, etc., like Amy Porterfield does.

Amy Porterfield uses third-party apps to feature video and her Pinterest feed on Facebook.

There are a wide variety of app providers to choose from and almost all offer free plans with pre-made templates, so even non-tech–oriented people can install them with ease.

Here are a few for you to check out:

The most important element of a successful Facebook page is a well-planned posting strategy.

You can have the prettiest cover photo and profile image, the most well-crafted About section and tons of amazing apps, but if your posting strategy lacks direction, you’re dead in the water!

Recent changes to the news feed algorithm mean you need to post more often to stay top of mind with your followers and get the most engagement. I recommend that pages publish three types of posts every day on their pages:

Tips for Photo Posts

For the most part, stay relevant to your followers. If you’re running a page about real estate, an image of Miley Cyrus makes no sense, but images of amazing homes, vacation spots and pictures of your town do make sense.

That said, feel free to bend the so-called “rules” a bit and post funny images or memes once in a while. Post Planner‘s fans appreciated the humor in the photo below.

This off-topic photo post generated a lot of engagement for Post Planner.

Tips for Text Update Posts

Due to the changes described in Facebook’s latest announcement, text-only updates are reaching fewer people than before:

“Through testing, we have found that when people see more text status updates on Facebook they write more status updates themselves. Over time, we noticed that this effect wasn’t true for text status updates from Pages…The latest update to News Feed ranking treats text status updates from Pages as a different category to text status updates from friends…posts from Pages behave differently to posts from friends and we are working to improve our ranking algorithms so that we do a better job of differentiating between the two types. This will help us show people more content they want to see. Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates…”

Skittles knows this doesn’t make text updates any less important.

Skittles’ text updates generate a lot of likes, comments and shares.

To increase text post engagement, use questions or fill-in-the blank updates that are easy for people to respond to.

Mix in text updates that require a short response from users in the comments.

Tips for Post Links

A business on Facebook should never put all of its stock in getting lots of likes, comments and shares with text and photo posts.

The real value is found in posts that drive traffic to your website that turns to sales or conversions. Once there, users can read your article, sign up for your newsletter or purchase a product.

Make link posts the focus of your posting strategy and you’ll be highly successful.

Include a well-crafted call to action that supports that goal to get people to click and go to your blog or website landing page, like TOMS does.

This link post on the TOMS page includes a strong call to action and an incentivizing coupon code to drive click-throughs to the landing page.

Make sure your landing page has a great image, because link posts now show a full-width photo preview on the news feed, which makes them look like photo posts.

Use a trackable URL from a service like bit.ly or Pretty Link so you can easily measure the click-through rate from Facebook.

In Conclusion

On a scale of 1-10 (10 being awesome) how would you rate your page? Is there room for improvement?

Use the tips above to make sure your page has the five elements of a successful Facebook page.

Create a clear cover photo, design a profile pic that scales well visually, and display your URL in your page’s About section. Next, add tactical functionality to your page with third-party apps and guide your page posting with a defined strategy.

What do you think? Did you find these tips helpful? Please share your thoughts and comments below.

Tweet!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,'script','twitter-wjs'); About the Author, Scott Ayres

Scott is the co-author of Facebook All-In-One for Dummies and "Ambassador of Awesome" at Post Planner, where his goal is to make everyone a Facebook Expert! Scott became addicted to social media before even MySpace (the first time around!). Other posts by Scott Ayres »

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