Using Facebook cover images to promote events

April 4, 2018 in

Let’s face it, I think we could all probably count the number of people we know ‘Not on Facebook’ on one hand. Social media is a fantastic way of keeping your group up to date on what’s happening around the school or club. But here’s the question, do we make the most of it? Your answer like mine is probably a resounding ‘no’.

Sure, we create events and page posts to promote upcoming events, but with all the constant changes to Facebook’s algorithms and increasingly needing to pay to reach the optimum number of people, we know that not everybody who should see our post or event will see it.

There are a couple of things we can do to help reach our group’s followers:

Advise everyone to set notifications from your page to ‘all’. This will mean that each time you post anything to your page, all your followers will receive a notification when they next check Facebook.
When you visit a particular page, what’s the one thing that you notice first? You guessed it! The cover image. This is a great way of additionally promoting what’s happening at your club or school.

Facebook cover images

Let’s talk a bit more about how you can use cover images. We’ll often update the cover image on our own personal page, but how often do we change the image on our school or club page. It’s probably not uncommon for the same image to sit there for months or even years. Those who have followed our Facebook page will know that we like to change it up to keep our followers informed of anything new that might be happening.

I know there are some people that will be thinking ‘How do I create an image?’ or ‘I can’t possibly do that!’ or even ‘Won’t we need to pay a graphic designer for that?’. Quit that negative talk right now and rest assured, you don’t need to be a graphic designer or Photoshop expert. There are a number of easy to use graphic design programs (like our favourite – Canva) that mean it’s not as difficult as you might think. I can do it and so can you!

Canva provides correctly sized templates so that you can create images for different social media platforms, including Facebook cover images. Even better if you’re lucky enough to have someone on your committee who’s a bit technically savvy because they just got nominated as the social media manager 😉

How to make it happen

The best way to start is to plan your yearly calendar of events. In some schools, this might be a combination of P&C/ P&F AND school events.

Make a list of dates and events for each month.
Give the list to your social media guru (whoever is nominated to do the creating) so that they can get started working their magic.
If you decide to create all your monthly images at the same time, they are easily saved for future use and can be amended as needed if dates change.
Your images may need committee approval before being published. This can be as simple as sending them by email, or in advance at your monthly meeting.
Publish your new image on the first of each month and then sit back and pat yourself on the back at how clever you are 😉

Remember that some months will be quieter than others and then you’ll also have big events like fetes where you might keep on your fete cover up for a couple of months in the lead up to the big day.

There are no hard and fast rules as all school and clubs are different and if your calendar is not as full, then don’t feel like you need to change it each month. Just adjust it as you need to but don’t forget about other means of promotion for events like the school newsletter, email, text messages and school apps too. If you use all these together, you certainly shouldn’t have anyone tell you they didn’t know something was happening!

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