Creating a new Facebook account is quite easy and just takes a couple of minutes. But, configuring all the important settings and features may take some time if you're new to this popular social media platform. These important settings not only help you increase your visibility but also ensures that each befriended Facebook user doesn't get confused when he lands on your profile. This includes filling in essential profile details, uploading vital pictures, tweaking default privacy settings, and much more. Once you've gone through all these essential steps, you're ready to rock the Facebook community. Let's get started!
Let's see some of these most critical steps that must be completed to get an impressive and persuasive Facebook account. All these steps are quite easy to follow and require no major technical skills.
It's not just new accounts, most of these steps can be applied to existing accounts too to enhance the profile by many folds. Let's see how a new Facebook account should be prepared—step-by-step.
1. Grab Your Preferred Vanity URL
This is one of the most critical tasks that must be completed without fail while creating a Facebook account. It's a custom URL through which your account can be accessed easily.
Instead of keeping a long cryptic profile address, it's always better to grab a shorter, meaningful, and memorable account URL.
If you have a common name used by a large number of people, most probably it has already been taken by somebody else with a different Facebook account. You can try different combinations and short forms to grab a suitable vanity URL that closely matches your name.
Once you're done with it, you've ensured that people can come to your profile—easily—through your account's custom vanity URL.
2. Upload Your Profile Picture
Once your vanity URL is all set, it's time to upload your profile picture which is generally considered the actual photograph of the account holder. Although you can upload an illustration, a sketch, or an artwork, I'll strongly suggest you use your close-up front shot photograph to avoid being marked as a spammy or suspicious profile.
The dimensions for the profile picture are (320 x 320) pixels. If you keep it smaller than this, it may be stretched to accommodate the space. Anything bigger than this may result in a cropped image.
Make sure you double-check your profile picture before uploading so that it complies with the guidelines. No copyrighted or objectionable image should be uploaded to your account's profile picture.
3. Upload Your Timeline Cover Image
If you've upgraded your account to Facebook timeline format, you must upload the large timeline cover image to take advantage of this premium space. This large cover image is an ideal space to tell about you.
The dimensions for the timeline cover image are (820 x 312) pixels. Remember; do not put commercials, copyrighted logos, web addresses, or call to action on the timeline cover image.
You can experiment with various cover images and can stick to the most appealing ones. Your friends' network can give you valuable feedback for the same.
4. Tweak Privacy Settings
This is one of the main concerns of a large number of people on various social media platforms. You must ensure that all important privacy settings are fine-tuned as per your requirement.
The most important settings are mostly related to the visibility of your profile updates, photo-tagging permissions, and security related to various Facebook applications. Here are some of the useful privacy settings that need to be tweaked for better security on Facebook.
And, do not forget to use a strong password for your account.
5. Invite/Import Contacts From External Services
Once your profile is ready with all the important things updated and tweaked, it's time to build your friends' network. For this, Facebook has a useful option that lets you import your contact lists from various email and social media services.
Simply provide your login credentials, and it automatically retrieves your contact list from the respective service. It speeds up the befriending process and relieves you from finding your friends one by one on Facebook.
Facebook never stores your login credentials while using this service so you can use it with full confidence to grow your network quickly.