Why images are an important aspect of building your business on Google+

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If you want to use Google+ to build your business, raise your visibility and position yourself with authority, it is absolutely vital that you build a picture of who you are and what your business is all about.

One of the best ways to do this is to give people something that they will come to recognise and you can do this is by using consistent branding and images throughout Google+.

Whether you are:
  • Adding a personal profile cover
  • Creating a business page cover
  • Setting up an event
  • Hosting a Google+ community
Branded images enable you to represent your business (and your business personality too...)

Rock the Right Dimensions for Your Cover Images


You have a massive cover image for your personal profile: 2120 × 1192 pixels..  That is a lot of space!

Now whilst my profile banner is not perfect - you can see here that I have made it both personal and I'm also telling people about my business too. This is important, because one of the first times someone may see you is on your profile, this is where they will come to find out more about you and the cover photo is the biggest area that will catch their eyes, so make the most of it!
If you have a business page, the cover image is the same size as your personal profile's cover (2120 × 1192 pixels) - Use it to showcase your brand and be consistent with your colour schemes..

Optimising for Google+ Events


Each of your events may be about something different, so you don't really want the same header everywhere do you?

No, absolutely not, but you do want people to recognise that the event is hosted by you, so create yourself an event template that incorporates your brand, and customise it according to the actual topic.

The size for your event headers is 1200 x 300 pixels.

Here you can see an example of some event headers I have created - whilst they are both different and about different topics, the branding and colour scheme is consistent, so that everyone can quickly recognise who is hosting the event.
Incorporating your brand with your personalised Event is key
   
Something important to note about your event headers is that in some places it is cropped, so you need to consider making sure that the outer edges are not too close to the sides of your image to allow for this.

Here's an example - This is a full event page and the header is completely displayed in this view:
This is the same event displayed on the upcoming events search page:
You can see that in the upcoming events search page screenshot (above), the event header has been chopped off a little (I believe that the size displayed in some views on Google+ is 1068 x 267 pixels, but you will need to test this out and play with your own headers to get this perfect as it will also potentially depend on peoples monitor resolution too).

Making Your G+ Communities Images Pixel-Perfect


A community page image is 250 x 250 pixels, and again the sides are cropped when you upload it so be sure to leave space on both sides when you create your image.

The two community images shown below are for different topics, but both are hosted by my business, so you can see that you can also brand yourself and keep things consistent in your communities too.
             
The more consistent you are with your images, the style you use, the colour schemes and your personality, the more people will recognise your events and communities when they are searching for something.

Over time, if you are sharing great content and adding value, people will start to be drawn to and look out for your images and recognise your branding.  And because they know that you offer great content, as soon as they see your images, they will know they are for something that they want to be part of....


To recap on the image sizes for you:

Your personal profile and business page header image/banner is 2120 x 1192 pixels
Your event headers are: 1200 x 300 pixels (display size seems to be 1068 x 267)
Community images are:  250 x 250 (the sides get cropped so leave space for this)