Message It—How to Make the Most of Your Facebook Timeline Page [Part 2]

Your Facebook cover photo is prime real estate, so it better be good.
Photographs have incredible power in their ability to draw us, almost sub-consciously, into stories. And it seems that digesting visual content, rather than the narrative content we’re more used to, allows us to engage a bit more freely and fully than usual.

The new Facebook template invites brands like your organization’s to place a large “cover photo” at the top of the page, up to a size of 851 x 315 pixels. That’s about 70% of the screen on my huge iMac screen, which means it could cover up to 80% of the vertical space of the average laptop. That doesn’t leave much space to view other elements on the page, so you have to make it rich and ultimately engaging.

Your Nonprofit’s Facebook Timeline Page: Checklist for Connection [Part 1]

If you haven’t started on Facebook yet, this is a great time to dive in (and it is the place to start with social media—with the potential to be a second website for your organization).

Even if you aren’t really launching publicly yet—as you’re still working on your marketing plan or have determined that social media isn’t yet a priority channel for your organization—get your feet wet now so you’ll be ready to go 100 m.p.h. when you have to.

The Secret to Startup Success from Pinterest's First Investor

“I was Pinterest’s first investor.” That’s a sentence I bet you wish you could say. Here at SXSW, I find myself sitting opposite angel investor Brian Cohen who happily owns that distinction. In other words, he found, as he calls them, a couple of young guys from NYU (Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp) at a business plan competition where angel investors “forage for new opportunities.” The rest is startup legend.

What is Pinterest and Can It Work for Your Business? [Guide]

Let me guess, you heard about Pinterest. Or more like, you can’t spend 15 minutes online without hearing about it…

And now you’re thinking, “should I jump on the wagon too?” or “another social network to keep up with?” and on top of that, everybody is talking about using it for marketing and getting tons of traffic and, you just don’t see it.

Alright, I hear you. I’ll give you everything you need to know about Pinterest and a bunch of resources so you can decide if you or your business are ready to join the hottest trend online.

Need Social Media Help? Try These Magazines

Four new monthly magazines advising business owners on how to use social media tools will go on sale beginning this week. Each publication focuses on one of the major platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn.

The magazines, published by GSG World Media, will cost $7.95 each at Office Depot stores. They will also be free in various digital formats to five million people who will receive an e-mail from Office Depot this week. The magazines are called: Tweeting & Business; LI & Business; fb & Business and The Big G & Business. A related Web site called socialmediamags.com opened on Monday.

Despite the huge volume of information about social media tips and tools online and in print, Eric Yaverbaum, associate publisher of the magazines, says he and his partners see an opportunity to use the print magazine format to reach some business owners trying to learn more about the digital world. He said that they were printing a total of 250,000 copies of the magazines at their introduction.

“Small-business owners and entrepreneurs are all trying to figure social media out,” Mr. Yaverbaum said. “Print magazines help make the information accessible to them. There will be great success stories and useful information.”

Jeffrey W. Hayzlett, the former chief marketing officer for Kodak, and one of the early evangelists for Twitter, is the editor of the magazine about Twitter. He will also have a monthly column and videos offering tips. “In this first column, it will be about best practices for business,” he said. “And what works, whether you are on Main Street or Wall Street.”

Another magazine, The Social Media Monthly, published by the Cool Blue Company, made its national debut in August. The cover article in its October issue asks what impact Google Plus will have on Facebook.

This article originally written by Jennifer Preston for the New York Times Media Decoder section.