Since it’s the biggest social network in the world, Facebook plays a big part in introducing you to people on the internet. And first impressions count.
No matter what your privacy settings are on Facebook, everyone can see your profile picture and cover photo. So these need to represent who you are and what you’re all about.
However, not everyone is a designer, so how can regular folks make a great impression with their Facebook profile picture and cover photo? These sites and apps can help…
1. Facetune2: The Best Profile Picture Editor
The easiest way to make a Facebook picture is to shoot a selfie. If you want to look your very best on Facebook though, use Facetune2, which is a great profile picture editor.
With a couple of taps, you can perform common beauty fixes like skin smoothing, teeth whitening, red eye removal, and more. There’s also an interesting feature where Facetune2 lets you reshape the jawline or face, in case you want to look a little different.
Apart from the beauty effects, Facetune2 has all the regular photo editing effects you would look for in an app, like the ability to blur the background, add filters and frames, and so on.
Download: Facetune2 for Android | iOS (Free)
2. Profile Overlays: Add a Filter to Your Profile Pic
Facebook’s temporary profile pictures let you show your support for a certain cause or send a message about some event. Instead of changing your profile picture outright, they only change it for a short period of time.
One of the side effects of this has been a rise in the number of “filters” or “overlays” for profile pictures, like the rainbow filter to show your support for LGBT rights.
While Facebook has some of these filters available in the app itself, there’s a large number it doesn’t have. If you’re looking for a specific overlay, like one to support your favorite soccer team or to show your patriotism for your country, check out Profile Overlays.
The trending overlays will tell you what the world is applying to their profiles right now, while you can search to find almost anything else. You can even request custom overlays!
In case you didn’t find what you were looking for, there’s another site you can check out. Rainbow Filter has its own collection of overlays, and also supports Twitter. The catalog is much smaller, but it has topics that Profile Overlays doesn’t support.
Visit: Profile Overlays
3. PicMonkey: Make Your Pictures Stand Out
PicMonkey is a paid online image editing service. It’s best for individuals and businesses that don’t have skills with image manipulation programs because it lets you add graphics, textures, text, and more to your images.
It’s great for profile pictures because you can change your eye and hair color, whiten your teeth, remove any wrinkles, and generally make yourself look flawless. There’s also a PicMonkey mobile app, but it’s best to use the website as it supports all of the features.
Visit: PicMonkey
4. First Covers: A Repository of Facebook Covers
Even if you know the perfect dimensions for social media cover photos, it’s difficult to know what you should put there. Your profile picture will probably be your face, so the cover photo is where your creativity can come into play.
First Covers lets you browse through hundreds of free Facebook cover photos that you can download and apply to your own profile. Covers are sorted by categories like actors, cartoons, flags, memes, movies, and many more.
If you like an image and want to use it as your cover photo, First Covers even provides a handy “Add this to your profile” button on every image. Click it, log in to Facebook, and make it your cover. Simple!
Visit: First Covers
5. Trendy Covers: Facebook Cover Generator
Trendy Covers has a large repository of free covers you can download and add to your profile. It also has an easy and excellent custom cover generator.
You can upload an image from your device and add any text you want. Trendy Covers lets you customize every aspect of how the text and image looks, from font colors to image dimensions. You can even set how opaque or translucent you want the elements to appear.
After you finish getting it just the way you want it to look, you can upload your new cover photo to Facebook directly from Trendy Covers, or download it to your hard drive.
Visit: Trendy Covers
6. Canva: Create Custom Covers the Easy Way
For more control over your custom Facebook cover, and a few more templates for inspiration, head to Canva. It’s a free online graphic design app that helps you make a custom cover photo that will wow your friends.
A bunch of premade layouts will get you started, especially if you aren’t good at figuring out which fonts to use or where to place text. Canva also has a bunch of gorgeous stock photos you can use (or you can upload one of your own).
Next, head to the “elements” section, where you can pick from different things to add, like a neat little chart, cool frames, or lovely icons.
Add a filter if you want, edit the text, and do whatever you feel like. Once you’re done, download the free custom cover photo to your hard drive, and then upload it to Facebook.
Visit: Canva
7-8. Holly and Slide.ly: Free Facebook Cover Videos
If you control a Facebook Page (Facebook Pages vs. Facebook Groups), you can add videos to the Cover. Now that sites are offering free and copyright-free videos to download, it makes sense to jazz up the cover of your Facebook Pages with one.
Holly and Slide.ly are two separate sites that have curated videos from Pexels, one of the best stock video resources. Click a video to download it, and then go to your Facebook Page to add it as a cover video.
The videos are selected for their production quality as well as how they are shot. After all, the Facebook cover’s dimensions are different from the standard 16:9 widescreen way of shooting videos. Nevertheless, the curated libraries of Holly and Slide.ly ensure videos will look good even on Facebook.
9. Biteable: Create Professional Ads for Covers
If you’re looking to promote a business on Facebook, you can use these video covers to really grab readers’ attentions. And you don’t need professional video making or editing skills.
To start, choose from the site’s library of video templates. You can change the text for any scene in a video, add or delete background music, and add or remove scenes. Biteable is remarkably easy to use, meaning that you don’t need to have any video editing skills to use it.
The finished product is free if you want a Biteable watermark on it. If you’re running a business, it’s a better idea to pay to download it for that professional look. Biteable costs $ 15/month on its lowest price plan.
Visit: Biteable
10. Pexels: Great Stock Images for Covers
Pexels is a great stock site packed full of high quality and high resolution images and videos that you can use for free. Stock images usually come with a price attached, so it’s wonderful to have a resource that costs nothing.
You can search the site for any term you want and it’ll likely have lots of choices available that will look great as your Facebook cover. Alternatively, search the site for “Facebook cover” to bring up results that have been tagged with that phrase.
Visit: Pexels
More Facebook Tips and Tricks
Using these sites and apps means you can have a more striking Facebook profile page and cover photo than ever before. And just remember that you can change your profile picture and cover photo regularly to keep things fresh.
Now that you’re guaranteed to be making a good first impression, it’s time to up your Facebook game in other ways. Here are the Facebook tips and tricks everyone should know.
Image Credit: TarasMalyarevich/Depositphotos
Read the full article: The 10 Best Tools for Better Facebook Profile Pictures and Cover Photos
