Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

How to Decide Your Facebook Cover

The following post is from Clinton Lee M’15, founder of McLee Oil, a summer 2015 hatchery business.

One day I, the founder of McLee Oil, felt that the company’s Facebook page cover had been there quite a while and wanted to make some change to it.  The current Facebook cover was designed a few months ago by a friend and cost about $100. Tired of looking at the same picture every day and thrilled by the Photoshop techniques that I had learned via Lynda.com which is an online software learning platform that Babson provides access to all its students, I decided to DIY a Facebook cover of my own. The new cover had two languages on it –English and French, and had a more modern feel. It took me a few hours sitting in Olin to design and Kevin, a classmate who spoke French, helped me to put the line in French.

However, when the picture replaced the old one, the other partner of McLee Oil, Mai Morgan, was very unhappy. She argued that the message was unclear and using a language that the target customers did not know was bad.  I, nevertheless, argued that the design was well composed and gave a more high-end feel.  Clearly no one was going to budge.  After a fierce fight, I finally had enough and said” show me the number”.

Mai Morgan was so motivated to prove her boss wrong that she put up a survey on the Facebook to ask the  fans to vote.  The survey tool she used was Survey Monkey.  The company had a one year enterprise subscription for 780 dollars. Yes, it was 780 dollars and we subscribed not because we liked the price, but because somebody mistaken $780 as $78.

The survey iss presented below. Picture A was the original one and picture B was the new version.  This is a very simple survey. You can also structure it into an experiment where each participant only look at and rate one picture, which was randomly presented.

mclee oil

The survey captured 30 responses., 63.33 %  of which said they like picture A better and 30% said they liked picture B better.  That said something, but I was still not sure whether our fans favor picture A over B significantly.  Then I recalled that in one of my classes at Babson, the professor had taught something similar. The technique is hypothesis testing to see whether it is significantly different from 50/50 distribution.

mclee oil 2.png

In order to test the significance, I ran a Chi-Square test with SPSS. The test gave a p value of 0.059 which did not qualify as significance of 95% but was very close, so we decided to change the Facebook cover back to the original picture A.

mclee oil 3

In general, we were very satisfied with this project because not only did we choose the cover picture that the fans like the most bust also the company engaged the fans in the process of making decision.

If you are interested in learning these techniques, it is actually taught in one of our Babson MBA classes.
MKT 7510 Marketing Research and Analysis
Anne Roggeveen

McLee Oil  is a company founded by a Babson student Lee, Kun-Che Clinton.  The company’s primary operating region is in Taiwan where people speak Chinese. The company is now looking for specialty food  stores in great Boston area to test the market. If you happen to be one of them please do not hesitate to contact us.