Branding Your Business with the New Cover Banner in Facebook?

You’ve probably seen the new Facebook cover header on the profile pages in the Facebook Timeline format. It’s a big banner photo above a two column timeline. [pullquote]Get Ready to Rebrand your Facebook Fan Page![/pullquote]

As an individual, you are NOT supposed to use the banner for anything commercial (like promoting your company.)  In fact, you’re not supposed to be using a profile page for a company anything.  It’s against Facebook’s terms of service. 

But I wonder about the smaller businesses where the person is the company.  It becomes such a part of you and your life.  I’ve seen some of my friends on Facebook make a collage of photos about their life for their banner and include their company logo in the collage.  That makes sense to me. 

If you’re running a small business and talk about your business in your personal Facebook profile page, you should definitely create a Facebook Fan page for your business.  But, since timelines aren’t here yet, you may want to consider adding something to your banner that includes your company too, right?

Makes sense to me if you are the company’s owner right? If you haven’t updated your banner yet, consider:

• Beth Kanter ‘s thoughts about using the Facebook Timeline Covers as a way to promote your brand Is a Good Idea or Not
• How Converstations Mike Sansone’s worked his logo into his cover banner.
• What the “queen of facebook” Mari Smith suggests for your Facebook banner and how she interpret’s Facebook’s rules concerning promotion of your company, product or service.

It’s just a matter of time before people get comfortable with banners and then Facebook will bring the banner feature out for the Facebook Fan pages.  Maybe sooner, who knows. 

Get Ready to Rebrand your Facebook Fan Page

Meanwhile, if you’re timeline cover and banner challenged, here are a couple of sites that will help:

• Big Huge Labs - a neat site that provides tools to make your photos more interesting
• Sign generator - another site with tools to give more interest to a photo
• Banner maker - a site that allows you to upload your own background and then some individual photos to make a collage.

Let me know what other sites you have found to help to adjust to the new Facebook Timeline.  It’s just a matter of time until the Facebook Fan Pages will be making the change.