Social media is a powerful tool. Almost everyone uses some form of social media, but most don’t leverage social media management to its full potential. Although people find hours every day to spend chatting, posting, sharing, and commenting on social media, they rarely seem to work on the key piece of their social presence: their profile... Your profile is one of the key elements of social media marketing and the first impression people will have of you, perhaps your future employer or business partner, so it’s always good to update it and keep it relevant. You never know.
With that being said, here are 3 major reasons why your social media profile sucks.
1. You use different photos and names across different social networks.
If your Twitter profile picture shows you with your kids and your LinkedIn profile shows you hanging out with your friends (probably not the best choice to begin with), people who search for you up can get confused or may even think it’s not the same person. Even if you hate close-ups and headshots, being recognizable on social media is important. The same goes for your name. Being consistent will help other people to find you more easily. Pretty simple: use the same, current photo on all your profiles and use the same name - whether it’s your real name or your nickname.
2. You’re tagged in all sorts of photos.
This was fun when you were a teenager, or even in your 20s. But once something is online, it is really hard to change and what happens to it is really out of your control. With that, now that you’re older, being tagged on drunk night-out photos can be detrimental to your profile and your employment opportunities. It’s fine to post the occasional picture of a birthday or concert, but make sure none of it puts you in a bad light. If pictures of you in an embarrassing state after a night out with friends end up on your social media, it could keep people from taking you seriously.
That’s why Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram allow you to review and approve or reject tags. Nobody can tag you without your permission, so you can regulate exactly what you want in your feed.
3. You leave bio fields blank.
How can you expect people to learn anything about you if you don’t give them any information in the first place? The biofield on your profile can be incredibly useful, so take advantage of it. Get creative to spark people’s interest. Add memorable keywords you want people to associate you with. This is especially useful for business-oriented platforms like LinkedIn. Think about the keywords for which you want to be found. Professional specialties? Unique skills? Think of LinkedIn as a big search engine - and one that gets regularly crawled by Google as well. By search-optimizing your profile, you’re increasing your visibility.
Do you have pet peeves for social media profiles?
Or recommendations on how to make them better?
Share!
