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 and makeover 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 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 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.
Grab your preferred vanity URL - This is one of the most critical tasks that must be completed without any 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 form 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.
Upload your profile picture - Once your vanity URL is all set, its time to upload your profile picture that is generally considered the actual photograph of the account holder. Although you can upload an illustration, a sketch or an artwork, but I'll strongly suggest you to use your own close up front shot photograph to avoid being marked as a spammy or suspicious profile.
The dimensions for profile picture are (180 x 180) pixels. If you keep it smaller then this, it may be stretched to accommodate the space. Anything bigger then this may result in the 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.
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 at a glance.
The dimensions for timeline cover image are (851 x 315) pixels. Remember; do not put commercials, copyrighted logos, web addresses or call to actions on the timeline cover image. You can experiment with various cover images and can stick to the most appealing one. Your friends' network can give you the valuable feedback for the same.
Tweak privacy settings - This is one of main concerns of 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.
Invite contacts from external services - Once your profile is ready for all 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 as shown in the image below.
Simply provide your login credentials and it automatically retrieves your contact list from the respective service. This 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.
