Ask a Filipino customer to find a small business and watch what they do. They open Facebook. They search the name, look at the profile picture, scroll a few posts, check whether anyone answered the last comment, and message the page.
That whole sequence happens before anyone sees your shop, your packaging or your website. For most businesses here the page is the shop front, so it is the thing worth designing for first rather than the thing you adapt to last.
The profile picture is your sign
It is small, it is cropped to a circle, and it appears beside every post, every comment and every reply you ever make. It is the single most repeated piece of your brand.
Which means the full horizontal logo with a tagline is the wrong file for it. In a circle, that lockup shrinks to fit and the tagline turns to grey mush. Use the mark on its own, or a monogram, centred with a little breathing room so the circle crop does not clip it.
Check it in a comment thread rather than on your page. On the page it is shown large and everything looks fine. In a thread it is tiny, and that is where the real impressions happen.
The cover photo crops differently on every device
A cover is wide on a desktop and much narrower on a phone, and Facebook crops the sides to fit. Anything important near the left or right edge disappears for the majority of your visitors, who are on phones.
Design it so the essential part — your name, the offer, the phone number — sits in the middle, and treat the outer thirds as decoration that may or may not be seen. Then check it on an actual phone before you keep it.
And do not put your address and contact details only in the cover image. They are unsearchable, unclickable and invisible to anyone using a screen reader. Put them in the page fields where Facebook can actually use them.
Design posts square, not wide
A square image takes up more vertical space in a phone feed than a wide one, which means more of the screen and more time in front of a thumb. It is the most reliable free improvement available to a small page.
Keep any text in the middle and away from the edges, because the same image often gets reused as a story, a thumbnail or an ad, and each of those crops differently. If you design for the safest middle area, one file survives all of them.
Keep the text short, too. Not because of any particular platform rule, but because a caption can be read and an image full of small type cannot, especially at the size a feed actually shows it.
Make the first three seconds do the work
People decide whether to stop scrolling before they read anything. What they register is colour, shape and whether it looks like the last thing they liked.
That is the argument for using your brand colour hard and consistently on every post. Not a logo in the corner — the whole post looking unmistakably like you. After a few weeks people recognise your posts before they read the name, and that is the point at which a page starts compounding.
It is also the argument against using a different template every time. Pick three or four post layouts, set them up once, and reuse them.
What to have ready before you post
A page that looks consistent from the first day needs a short list of files, not a big project:
- The mark on its own, square, centred, for the profile picture.
- A cover image with everything important kept to the middle third.
- Three or four square post templates in your colours and fonts.
- A story-shaped version of the same templates for the tall formats.
- Your address, hours, phone number and Messenger fully filled in the page fields, not just drawn into an image.
Then let it flow outward
Once the page looks right, everything else gets easier rather than harder. The same square templates become Instagram posts. The same colours go on the tarpaulin. The same mark goes on the receipt and the uniform.
Our Premium brand kit includes the social media set for exactly this reason: for most businesses here it is not a nice-to-have at the end of the project, it is the first place the brand actually gets used.
Common questions
- What should I use as my Facebook profile picture?
- The logo mark on its own, centred and square, with a little space around it so the circular crop does not clip it. Not the full horizontal lockup with a tagline — at profile-picture size the tagline is unreadable and just makes the mark smaller.
- Why does my Facebook cover photo get cut off on phones?
- Covers are wide on desktop and narrower on mobile, so Facebook crops the sides. Keep anything essential — your name, the offer, the number — in the middle third and treat the outer edges as decoration. Then check it on a real phone, not just on your laptop.
- Should social media posts be square or landscape?
- Square, in most cases. A square image occupies more vertical space in a phone feed than a wide one, so it holds attention longer. It also crops more gracefully when the same image is reused as a story, a thumbnail or an ad.
- How much text should go on a post image?
- Less than you think. The image is there to stop the scroll; the caption is there to explain. Small type in an image is unreadable at feed size and cannot be searched, copied or read aloud by a screen reader, so anything that matters belongs in the caption as well.
- Do I still need a website if my Facebook page is working?
- A page is enough to start and many Filipino businesses run well on one for years. A site becomes worth it when you want to be found on Google rather than only on Facebook, when you need to show a catalogue or prices properly, or when you want somewhere you own rather than rent.
