One of my favorite television shows is Iron Chef with Alton Brown. It’s a food competition between Iron Chefs (resident chefs) and challenger chefs over a themed secret ingredient, which is revealed in the beginning.
Judges determine the winner by scoring entrees on taste, plating (design and looks of presentation) and originality. Looks (plating) is worth 25%.
We live in a visual world. Before food even hits our palette, we taste it with our eyes. This is why visual real estate is so important.
Facebook Page Photo Banner
Facebook’s Pages allow you to have a cool photo strip across your wall. It’s one of the first things you will see when landing there. It looks almost like a billboard.
Normally, it contains random cropped images from your most recent upload. No problem. Just follow these steps.
Create Images
Facebook crops images. And it’s quite annoying. But, I’ve painstakingly made guide lines in Photoshop where the images are cropped, so that you will have the perfect photo strip.
Plus, I don’t want to upload small thumbnails like 97×68 pixels. If people click on the thumbnails, I want nice big pictures!
You can download my templates here. I’ve made rounded corners and square corners for your choosing.
Upload Images
Create a new photo gallery and call it whatever you want. I named mine “Photo Strip.” Upload the images and the most recent will appear in your photo strip.
You do not have control over the ordering of the images, so don’t try to make it a consistent image unless they can be linked like Lysol. No matter how you order the thumbnails, they’re linked by the blue ribbon.
And if you ever upload new images or are tagged in some, you could always hide photos by rolling over the image and hitting the “x.” You can always undo this action in your Admin dashboard.
My suggestion is to upload one image from each of your top five portfolio shoots. Each image will have a call to action.
Call to Action
Once users click on an image, add some blurb about the photo shoot and a link to an expanded blog post. Remember to add “http://” in front of your blog post link, so that it’s clickable. For example –
June 30, 2011 – Bulldog Fashionista
I love it when pets are personified with clothing. Recently, I photographed the most…
[link to bulldog photo shoot blog post]
What to do next…
Let’s recap the steps.
- Determine your 5 portfolio shoots.
- Use the templates here and create giant thumbnails.
- Upload your images to your Facebook Page.
- Add various call to action links.
- Post your Page link on my Facebook Wall, so that others could admire and get inspiration.
- Share this blog post with others with Twitter, Facebook and +1 buttons below.
Thanks and have a nice day,
Lawrence Chan
P.S. I recently ran out of straws for my iced coffees, so I used a Red Vine. Awesome!
P.P.S. I got a nice email from Eric Fung about my psychology to pricing e-book that I wanted to share :)
P.P.P.S. Are you celebrating July 4th? If so, how?
I’m celebrating July 4th with a hamburger. Oh, yeah…mmm…
Another great tips! Thanks for sharing, now let me plan my photo strips!
Awesome tip! Can’t wait to try this out. :) As for July 4th, our 3 kids are on a local swim team and the team is marching in the town’s parade. After that? Chilling at home, BBQ, and just enjoying friends & family. Have some firecrackers for later to celebrate! My 60D will be in my hands the entire time, natch. LOL
Always enjoy your tips and tricks! Thanks so much for the post!!!!
great idea! Now if only I decided to do something w/my fb business page- =P
Promote your business, Mr. Nakai!
Personally, I’d use it to do contests and fun games with photo clients.
Fabulous tutorial and templates, many thanks. As a hobbyist photographer I ‘only’ have a personal fb page so not sure if it’s different on the business pages but I can order the strip photos based on upload order. For example at the moment my strip is 5 letter photos so it spells Hello at the top of the page.
This is great! Thank you!
I like this idea … Will work that out pretty soon…
Great tutorial, thanks!
It’s WONDERFUL to find a site that is all about marketing for Photographers, and especially with tips about marketing thru Facebook.
Before I publish my Facebook Page, I’m trying to find out what the different Page categories are all about, because I know you can’t change the category after you create and publish a FB Page.
I’m trying to figure out if there are any advantages or disadvantages of selecting certain categories – e.g. should I select Company > Professional Services, or should I select Artist > Artist? I’m told that I should avoid Local Business since my photography business is not a studio (not located in a small geographic area) and I travel quite a distance for some clients (including the opposite coast, and overseas), and if I select Local Business then posts won’t show up on my non-local friends and fans news feeds.
Do you know anything about the different categories for Pages, or do you have anyone you could refer me to who might know? Thanks!
Lawrence — What happens when you upload photos after uploading the strip? does FB then display the newer images pushing these aside? do you have to republish this set after every other upload? Thanks for what you do.
-Chris
Lawrence, thanks for this great idea. I’m going to be redesigning our facebook fanpage soon, so this advice is super helpful.
Pingback: Photographer Friday: How to Customize Facebook Page Photo Strip
Thank you so very much! This is PERFECT!