More Changes to Facebook Cover Photos
With the vast amount of video consumed on Facebook every day, it was only a matter of time before a video cover option became available. Adding a video in place of a static image on the cover of your business page isn’t the only recent change, you may have also noticed that some pages now have text on the cover photo.
Here’s what you need to know about the updates.
Facebook Video Cover Images
In April this year, Facebook started testing video cover images on some pages and this is now becoming available to more and more pages. As the cover image is the first thing you notice when looking at a business page, it’s a great opportunity to grab users’ attention and tell them exactly the page is about in a way that a static image can’t. (If a picture speaks a thousand words, just imagine what a video can say about your business).
You may have seen business pages that are already making the most of this new feature, we love the example below from the VisitCairngorms Facebook page (and it does its job as it makes me want to pack up and head there now!).
To upload a video cover, follow the same steps as you would to change the photo – hover the mouse over the camera icon on the top left of the cover photo and click on the ‘Change Cover’ button. You can either select ‘Choose from Videos’ and click on the video you want to use, or ‘Upload Photo/Video’.
Other things you should know:
- The video will start playing automatically when users visit your page (on mute as a default setting, although there is the option for users to unmute)
- Videos can range from 20-90 seconds (and you have the option to make them loop)
- The recommended size for uploading a video is at least 820 x 312 pixels but 820 x 456 pixels is said to be ideal
For more information take a look at this blog post by Social Media Today. We love their idea of creating content for this by selecting some photos and uploading some music in a video editing tool.
Facebook Cover Photo Text
We first noticed this on the Tuminds Facebook page. Text suddenly appeared on the cover photo, which appeared to have been pulled over from our Description (and to be quite honest, we weren’t overly keen on it). Today we came across this article on adding text to cover photos, again by Social Media Today, which states that Facebook has “recently started testing several cover area designs and enhancements to help businesses feature key information more prominently.”
Facebook has indeed pulled the text from the Description but, if there is text is on your cover photo, you can click on the Edit button to change the information (there’s a limit of 100 characters).
We’re still in ‘two minds’ about the cover photo text – let us know what you think in the comments!
