Steve Dotto here. Glad you could join me today. Today, we�re going to take on Facebook cover
photos, you know those background photos, the foreground, maybe profile pictures, too,
in Facebook. It�s really nice to go to a landing page on Facebook and see a nice cover
photo that speaks to you. So many of us are graphically challenged and Facebook has all
these special size requirements, how much texture allowed, and all sorts of things so
I went looking for a tool that would help me.
The main reason I started looking for a tool is I�ve been taking a workshop on making
my DottoTech Facebook page better and if you visit it recently, you might notice it has
significantly improved. I�ve been taking this workshop with Mari Smith. She�s really
got a nice handle on how to communicate, especially as a company and as a brand on Facebook. One
of the first things she taught us in the course is of course to improve the look of our Facebook
page. I have to show you this because I�m kind
of embarrassed but this used to be the landing page or my cover photo in Facebook as I started
the course. I had a thousand followers or a thousand likes and probably the ugliest
Facebook cover photo on the planet. I had like a grainy version of part of my logo because
I started working on it, I can remember, trying to figure it out, trying to get it to format,
trying to get it to fit, and I failed miserably so I just said screw it. That's what I went
with it for the longest time but taking Mari�s course taught me okay, I really need to figure
things out so now I have changed my Facebook landing page on the DottoTech site to this.
Let me just show you what it looks like now. So it used to look like that and now if we
scroll down there, there it is. That's what it looks like now. It much better represents
the kind of fun that we have on the radio show and my own personality and that sort
of stuff. So I think that we�ve done a good job on that and I found a tool that helps.
I want to show you how I went about creating that sort of a page so you can use it if you
have fan page or if you happen to have a personal page.
Now I do need to make somewhat of a disclaimer. I am not going to tell you what looks good
graphically and what doesn�t look good graphically. You can tell by my particular layout technique
that I am somewhat limited. I go for the collage because that�s what I can do. But the tool
that I�m going to show you allows your artistic talents to come to the fore and there's a
whole variety of these free tools out there now. This one�we�ll put the information
link in YouTube�allows us to create either fan page covers or personal profile cover
pages. Now I really don�t know the difference between the two other than one�s on a fan
page and one�s on a personal page but they seem to have the same basic layout and that
sort of stuff. I�ve already done my fan page once so I�m going to show you how you
can do all the different things to create your own personal page but if you have a fan
page, the same tools work. Now they allow us to deal with basically three
elements. You can deal with your foreground picture, your profile picture that goes in
a little square here but we�re all pretty comfortable with dealing with that now. Typically,
we just put our logo or one picture in and it�s all about cropping. I�m not going
to give you a cropping lesson for sure now. You can just choose that photo and if you
want, you could upload the photo that you use so you can see what it�s going to look
like as far composition goes or you can just wait later on and you can bring it in when
you�re actually in Facebook. Now dealing with the actual cover photo itself
or the cover area, you have both background and foreground images. They allow you to basically
crop and rotate images into that and then adjust the color and the saturation a little
bit as well as add different graphical elements. Basically, you just assemble whatever you
want into this window right here. So all you have to do is upload either a foreground or
a background image. I�m going to upload a background image first
to show you how that works. I�ve got a little background here. I just when into my iPhoto
library and I found kind of an out of focused picture of the view from our cabin at our
lake that our family has in the Caribou so I thought that would make a nice background
photo. As you can see, it�s a little bit dark. It�s really a crummy photo but that
kind of blurriness might work for background. I don�t know. Is my artsy side coming out?
But you can adjust by sliding these things. You can adjust the saturation, the color,
the background brightness, the contrast. You can wash it out, make it really washed out
like that sort of thing. You can adjust the photo to suit your needs.
Then you can choose other photos to bring in. Now you might take a photo and you might
in Photoshop or in another program, even just in Preview, and you can remove the background
from a photo if you just want to have your foreground image and you want to kind of be
able to sit over the top. You can do all sorts of things with your photos. That�s the preparation
work you do before you start assembling it in this application.
But once you�ve done all of that, you can start uploading the photos to it. I�m just
going to choose me when I was a kid going camping. So I can position that photo wherever
I want and I�ve got basic cropping tools and size adjustment tools so I can make it
a little bit larger if I want. I could make it quite a bit bigger and then just have it
kind of there in the corner. I can rotate it. If you�re really artsy, you can start
to spin the pictures and stuff like. Always go back and click reset to set it back where
it was. You can adjust the composition of the picture and bring in as many different
photos as you want, as many different elements as you want, and put them all together.
Let�s have another picture of me since we�re on a roll. Let�s have me in costume. Is
this turning into one of the best cover photos ever? You can see that you can kind of go
collage-y or you can go nice background image with maybe just a little bit of text and a
simple photo. You�ve got all of the different control to do those things as well. You can
put in very quickly and easily text here and you can do those sorts of things, drawing
in images or bringing in graphical elements, choosing which fonts you want�it�s got
a limited number of fonts of course but you�ve got a few fonts to choose from�and then
having stroke and fill color to kind of fill in and use your text, to give your text different
treatments. All of this is however much skill, however much time, you want to bring.
One of the things that�s kind of nice about this though is it really deals with the layers
very simply because layering is so important as you set the different images in so whatever
one you click on last is the one that's most in the foreground. So when you go to actually
export the photo, whatever one you�ve done last, you set your layers just by clicking
and choosing kind of from back to front, and then once you�ve finished that, you can
export it. So when it�s all said and done, what we do is we just go Save timeline cover
photo right here and then it exports it as a png file for us that we can then upload
into Facebook. You already should know how to upload that into Facebook. The bottom line
is it�s really easy to compose a much more interesting, much more dynamic cover photo
for either a fan page or your for own personal profile page.
I hope you found this little tutorial useful. If you have, please give us a Like. We appreciate
the kudos. I�m Steve Dotto. Thanks for taking time to chat with me today.
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