Facebook Covers

Posted by Gabe on December 31, 2011 under Facebook, Kids are Heroes | 2 Comments to Read

One of the reasons I like to follow @JohnHaydon on Twitter is that he always keeps me on my toes as far as maintaining pace with Facebook goes. Among other things he provides tips to non-profits how they can maximize the benefits of what Facebook offers. Now I could do what he does and read all the blogs and the trends to stay up on it, but I almost feel that he is my personal assistant. One thing he doesn’t do though is get me coffee in the morning. *Sigh* Still working on that.

Yesterday I came across the following tweet delivered by John:

How to create Facebook covers for your nonprofit (template included) aweber.com/t/IsLJ8

— John Haydon (@johnhaydon) December 30, 2011

Now always being the last to upgrade my stuff, I hadn’t even adopted the new timeline in Facebook yet. But after having read his post, I felt I had better do it quick and also offer some covers of our own. The post discusses not only making covers for one’s own page, but offering a variety of them to fans so they can display them proudly and help us get our message out. This is a great way to promote our organization in a really fun way.

Now word has it that these covers are not supposed to be too “pushy” as far as selling anything goes or even asking for donations. And according to Facebook’s terms and conditions you cannot sell this space to anyone. I can understand the latter part but find it kind of odd that what you put on your ‘personal’ cover is anyone else’s business. However we are up to this challenge to create covers that are attractive yet as John says, “lightly branded”.

So we were off to the races yesterday. Our “so far” list of covers that are free for all to use is here on our website. If you know us well enough you will know that Michelle Maritz, an amazing artist from South Africa, has been helping us design posters and calendar pages. I took the graphic from her January calendar and made a cover out of it. I can’t wait till she and her daughter Margot send me some more original covers. Their works are so whimsical and wonderful.

So we would love it if you let us know what you think of our new covers. And if you use one of them let us know about it in the comments and we will “brag” about you on Facebook and Twitter. You can even vent about what you think of the new Timeline feature. Like everyone else I really get annoyed with Facebook when it consistently gives us sweeping changes like these. But this new Timeline feature is growing on me. I just hope they keep it around for more than a month.