To maintain its dominant position in today’s digital marketing landscape, Facebook has many tricks that help people and brands advertise and sell their products and services. For example, it lets you make a slideshow to promote your page.
Now, slideshows can be used strictly for advertising and certainly inside a Facebook page, but the ability to upload your own music and choose the images you want to use is pretty neat.
So how do you make these slideshows? Keep reading to find out.
Making a Slideshow from a Facebook Page
To make a slideshow on Facebook, you must have your own page. Slideshows can be made for free, but their main purpose is to further boost your page’s ranking. As soon as you get on your computer to your page, you should be able to see the Photo/Video button below the status update text box.
This is the button you need to click. It will take you to a new, smaller menu and ask what you want to do. Click “Create slideshow”.
A new window will open to guide you through preparing your slide show. To do this, you need three to ten images. The rest is pretty self-explanatory, because you can turn on transitions, choose the aspect ratio, and decide the lifetime of the images (how long each image stays on the screen).
Of course, you can also add music. You can use some of Facebook’s stock royalty-free tracks or add your own music. However, keep in mind that you should avoid uploading copyrighted music and you must have the legal rights to the track you want to upload. First check if it’s ok to install whatever you have in mind.
Once you start adding images, you should have the option to upload a photo or take a photo. Select the “Upload Photo” option.
Fortunately, you can add more photos at once.
As soon as you are done with this, you can click “Create Slideshow”. Facebook does this really fast, so it takes you back to your page where the slideshow is ready to load in a matter of seconds. You can play the slideshow before loading it to see if everything is as it should be. If not, there’s an Edit button inside the playback window that takes you back to where you were just now. Otherwise, you can decide whether you want to share now or schedule the upload for a specific time.
When you are satisfied with the result, click “Share Now”. Facebook loads your slideshow in the background and sends you a notification when it’s done.
Making a Slide Show from the Introduction Menu
Facebook also offers the option to create a slideshow to promote your business or Facebook page. This way, your slide show can also act as an advertisement.
You need to click the Promote button below the page options to get started. A Promote window will open. What you’re looking for is the “Promote Your Page” option, so click it.
What makes this quite useful is the ad creation options. In this way, you can instantly determine the duration of the ad, its budget and payment currency, as well as the target audience. Since you are making an advertisement, you will have to pay for this option.
Another useful thing about creating an ad this way is the ability to save a slideshow as a draft. For seven days, Facebook will remember that you have an unpublished ad. Also, if you hover over an image in the slideshow creation window, you’ll have the chance to edit the image by clicking the small round pencil icon in front of each thumbnail. This editing tool also lets you add a simple caption to each picture.
Additional Tips
Facebook recommends that your images have a resolution of at least 1280×720 pixels for best results. More importantly is consistency. All images must have a similar aspect radio. If it tends to be different, Facebook will lock the slideshow aspect ratio to 1:1.
Facebook also recommends using MOV or MP4 file formats for video, as well as WAV, MP3, M4A, FLAC, and OGG for audio.
Signing out
Facebook’s slideshow creation option is perhaps not the best on the market, but it’s really good as it lets you make any number of free slideshows. Another big plus is the time required, as you can make a slideshow in minutes or less, even if you’ve never used this option before.
Have you ever created a slideshow for your Facebook page? Did you use it as an advertisement? Tell us about your experiences in the comments below!
