Do you change your Facebook page every month?
A lawyer asked me that this week, when he noticed that the Arizona Attorney Facebook page had a unique profile image.
Doesn’t everyone do that? I answered. But no, I guess not. And that’s a shame.
Changing your Facebook image for your business or product is not a no-brainer. Some may argue that keeping your brand constant and recognizable—never changing—is the most important thing. Until this past spring, I generally agreed with that.
But then Facebook got all Timeline-y up in our grill, forcing a new look onto all of us. And the result has been … pretty good, if you ask me. It has allowed us to vary that large image to relate more closely to every month’s cover content.
So now we have our magazine cover (the current one every month) as our smallish image to the left side of the screen. And Timeline opened up a broad swath of real estate to us. What could we do with that big screen-wide space?
Quite a bit, I decided.
So when you look at our current page, remember that the photo collage—materials in regard to ASU Law School—is not everlasting, but just there for the month. It relates to our cover story, which this month is a Q&A with Law School Dean Doug Sylvester.
Below you’ll find a few of our other profile images. The small photo of each cover is your hint about what the larger image “means.”
And in case you’re wondering how we create the image: It’s a mad dash in my house in the days (hours?) before the new issue “rolls out” on the first of the month.
“What do we have in the house that’s British?” I asked my beleaguered daughters as I mused on our July/August cover (about the history of legal language).
“Quick, haul out your art supplies!” I barked, as our May Creative Arts issue was about to land in the cloud.
“That huge coin bucket—where is it?” I hectored, thinking about how to illustrate our annual Top Verdicts issue.
A little staging, some bad (natural) lighting, and we had a new image for the month. It takes a village, or at least a few dragooned villagers.
Maybe all of it doesn’t matter much. After all, most people interact with businesses they have “Liked” through their own news feed; they may rarely go to the brand’s Facebook page. But I just see that page as another opportunity—to communicate our content and tone, and occasionally to interact with readers who appreciate our involvement in all parts of their brains.
Coming up this fall: magazine covers on the historic Tombstone trial and on lawyer happiness. Ideas welcome.
Here are our recent pages, which you can click to enlarge (for Change of Venue Friday fun, can you spot the barnyard animal? Comment below if you find it). Have a great weekend!
AZ Attorney 
May 20, 2013 at 9:31 am
[…] fall, I wrote about the pleasure I take in Facebook’s then-new broad profile photo. I argued that it could especially be useful for businesses on that social media […]