Visual Content Creation for Facebook

Using your Facebook Page creatively isn’t as hard as it sounds. In fact, it’s good fun. What it does mean is that you’ve probably got to get more involved with visual content creation. Not just written content. If you post a good picture to any one of your social platforms, chances are that it’s going to get shared, if at least by one person. A single share on a platform like Facebook means that approximately 300 more people (your friend’s friends) get to see what you posted.

So, your aim: create shareable, visual content.

The Easy Stuff

Cover Photos

Looking for Facebook cover ideas? A few words of advice – don’t be boring. No matter what type of business you operate, whether you manufacture machine parts or sell children’s toys, you can do something different. Boring is sin, especially if you’re trying to garner favour with fans, and indeed, if you’re in the world of marketing where creativity abounds.Browse some of your favourite brands. You will likely find a few that have got a creative Facebook Cover.

Take a look at the Kentico CMS Facebook Page above. The company offers a flexible platform for website developers to build sites on, and a place where marketers can easily publish and manage content. It’s not the type of company you could imagine having an attention-grabbing cover photo, but it does. It’s funny, daring and different.

I’m not going to bore you with a detailed discussion on cover photos. Instead, I’m going to direct you to our Pinterest board Catch me a Cover where you will find a selection of our favourite creative facebook cover photos.

Profile Pictures

Maybe you don’t have to be overly creative with this one, but if you have the opportunity to or if you work for a company that likes to be seen as creative, do it.

This doesn’t mean you have to disregard your logo. Take Fanta’s Timeline profile picture. It’s 3D and it fits in with their cover photo. There’s even a ‘Make your own 3D glasses’ exercises on their wall – talk about creative digital content! What’s great about their page is that their profile picture doesn’t stand alone. They didn’t just stick with the old Fanta logo. They made it do something for them. They made it pop. Literally. Perhaps it’s part of the reason their page has…oh, say 3 million fans! If you’re going to get into creative content marketing you should expect to get seen.

Nike’s also dared to be different. Rather than just use the famous tick logo, they’ve chosen to push something specific – their + range of products. Note the little plus next to the tick. In this way, their logo does some additional digital marketing work for them. It reminds people that Nike isn’t just shoes and clothes. It’s now a tech company too.

Apps and App Landing Pages

 

Part of your creativity here will rely on the developers you have at your disposal. Look at any big brand and you will notice that they’ve got personalised apps – Intel, Microsoft, Sainsbury’s and so on. If this is not an option, consider highlighting other social platforms in the app section – it’s easy to link Pinterest, Twitter and Google Plus to this section. You could also look for a contact form app as we’ve done while we plan and build our own personalised app landing pages. If this is a service you’re interested in, get in touch.

Slightly Tougher Stuff

Timeline Wall Posts

What type of digital content will you publish? This is the real question and it’s a question that you’re not just going to have to answer once. It’s ongoing, at least if you want to stick with the times and keep followers interested. Your posts are part of your social strategy and there are a few questions you should be asking: How does your digital content on your Facebook page contribute to your overall brand identity? What are you trying to achieve with each of your posts? And of course, once you’re up and running, how are people responding to you?

Furthermore, it’s my opinion that increasingly, your content has got to be visually appealing. If this isn’t already obvious because of the changes Facebook made to profile and fan pages, it should be when you think of the staggering growth of social networks like Pinterest which has approximately 104 million users and which is now the third largest social network in the world. The first being Facebook (7 billion users) and the second Twitter (184 million users).

If you’re looking for ideas, I suggest taking a stroll through some of your favourite brand pages. One thing you’ll notice – they’re all very image-focused.

Otherwise, here are a few of my ideas:

Get visual with Facebook

 

• Share your blog posts (make sure that they’ve got pictures attached)
• Create a visual summary of published content
• Post photos and create photo albums
• Instead of just posting a status update, post a photo with the update (in my experience, it gets more views and grabs attention much faster)
• Post product pictures (new products, popular products, etc)
• Post videos
• Post tutorials
• Create pictures specifically for Facebook
• Post Slideshare presentations
• Create, invest in and share infographics

If you are going to be producing a lot of visual content and you don’t have Photoshop, there are some great free photo-editing/graphic design applications that you can use and download for free. A couple of my favourites are Paint.net and Gimp. Though honestly, if you can get your hands on Photoshop, you’ve got much more flexibility.

Other suggestions for going visual

• Get a subscription to use a stock image library
• Inspire your followers and fans to share images with you. One of our customers is doing a fantastic job doing just this – Closer to Nature. View David’s Facebook page here.
• Take photos of new uses for your products
• Take photos of cool things people don’t usually get to see

If you’ve got any suggestions, I’d love to hear from you.