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Today, a social media profile can either make you or break you. If you haven’t given a lot of thought to your profiles, then it’s time to pay attention to them. Most people, before following, liking, or friending you on social media will click and look at your profile to ensure that you’re the type of person they want to follow.
Not only that – potential clients, customers, and employers look at social media profiles to determine whether or not they want to do business with you. Thankfully, it’s not that hard to make a good profile and you can use components of any profile on one social media network, tweak it and use it on another. After all, you want your profiles to be cohesive across all channels.
It Starts with a Great Photo
If you’re creating a personal profile to represent yourself as a business owner, then you need a great headshot that represents the professional tone of your industry. This isn’t necessary for a personal Facebook profile, but use a great stock photo, your logo, or a headshot for your business profile. Set up a good photoshoot with changes of clothing. Make sure to get your hair and makeup professionally done for a photo shoot. Great places to find people to take pics and do your hair and makeup at a low price are local colleges and university photography and cosmetology students.
Provide Directed Information
You don’t need to put everything you’ve ever done on your profiles. Instead, pick and choose what you put on the profile based on what you’re trying to accomplish. Remember to phrase everything toward your audience. They should read your profile and immediately understand what you do, who you do it for, and why you do it.
Distinguish Yourself from Others
Depending on the platform you’re using, outside of your picture you probably have other things that can showcase what you do for people. Some social media networks like LinkedIn allow you to put video, slideshows, PDF documents and more for your audience to be able to review what you do and the results of what you’ve done.
Keywords Still Matter
If you want to position yourself as an expert and authority in your niche, learn the keywords and terms that are used to find those experts. That way, when someone searches for someone who does what you do, they can find you because you’ve used the right keyword phrases and words in your descriptions, summary, and experience.
Keep It Up-to-Date
You want to try to at least update your profile on a monthly or quarterly basis. Update your status and posts as often as the network average. For example, they say to update Twitter up to two times a day, Facebook about five to seven times a week, Instagram once a day, and LinkedIn several times per week. If there is no activity on the profile it will seem as if you aren’t active in your business. People might pass you up.
Keep Professional and Personal Separate
When possible, keep your professional life separate from your personal life. But, realize that people who are actively searching for you, especially on Facebook and Instagram, may find your personal profile as well as your business profile. In this case, ensure that you set your account settings properly.
Making a wow-worthy social media profile is an important component in being active in any community. Creating a stand-out profile requires just a little effort and can be done over time in just a few minutes a day. Take the time to work on one aspect on one social network each day and your profiles will truly be wow-worthy.
