Choosing an image for your social networking

Let’s face it: peo­ple do judge a book by it’s cover. If your tweets are the book, your avatar is the cover. It’s the first thing most peo­ple look at and it imme­di­ately sets the tone for how they inter­pret your tweets. (Avatar = your pro­file pic­ture on social networks)

The approaches to choos­ing an avatar are many, and they are var­ied. I chose these peo­ple as exam­ples for a rea­son — they’re smart, good peo­ple. You should fol­low them.

• mys­te­ri­ous avatar
• pro­fes­sional avatar
• ‘fun guy’ avatar
• IN YOUR FACE avatar
• not-a-real-picture avatar
• framed-for-a-cause avatar (props to Scott Hale for point­ing out the rec­og­niz­abil­ity of the #12for12k avatars). And many, many more.

Let’s take a look at dif­fer­ent approaches to choos­ing your avatar.

Per­sonal Accounts

Because I think I know myself pretty well, let’s use me as an exam­ple. Any­one who fol­lows me on Twit­ter con­sid­ers me to be syn­ony­mous with my green hat. I get ques­tions and com­ments about it all the time. Do I actu­ally wear it? (Yes.) Where did I get it? (stole it from my roomie, Travis) Do I seri­ously wear that thing? (Again, yes.)

At one point, I switched from a green hat avatar to one with­out the hat. Over the next few days, I had tweets and DMs along the lines of, “didn’t rec­og­nize you with­out the hat!” or “Dude, you should keep the hat. It’s your per­sonal brand,” and even, “I always thought you had a bald spot or something.”

How­ever, the green hat is not immune to crit­i­cism. I’ve often been told it’s “unpro­fes­sional.” This is a valid argu­ment. You don’t see many peo­ple in the busi­ness world walk­ing around with a neon green hat on.

So why did I choose the green hat? It’s me. I wear bright col­ors, mostly neon. I live life my way, I live it loudly, and I think the green hat puts off that vibe. Are there draw­backs to it? Of course. Ten years from now, some peo­ple might still asso­ciate me with the green hat (then again, I might still wear it ten years from now). It might pre­vent me from land­ing a job at cer­tain places post-graduation (a dis­cus­sion for an entirely dif­fer­ent post).

As illus­trated ear­lier, there are many types of avatars to choose from. Just be sure you weigh the pros and cons of each. It really does impact how peo­ple per­ceive you and your tweets.

Brands

For busi­ness and brands, the options are fairly straight­for­ward. You can opt for the company’s logo (as we do at @penguinspark), a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the brand, or a com­bi­na­tion of the two (@KeithBurtis). Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each style -

Brand’s Logo

• Pro: The visu­al­iza­tion (logo) of your brand is mem­o­rable. Stud­ies show that kids who can’t even read can rec­og­nize promi­nent logos. Visu­als are typ­i­cally con­sid­ered to be the strongest form of communication.
• Pro: Typ­i­cally allows for mul­ti­ple peo­ple to tweet from the account (usu­ally with a sig­na­ture like “^CG”).
• Con: Brands can lose the ‘human touch’ of Twit­ter. Peo­ple trust faces more than they trust logos.

Brand Rep­re­sen­ta­tive

• Pro: Consumer’s can see the face of who they’re inter­act­ing with, form­ing a more per­sonal con­nec­tion with the brand. It’s eas­ier to form a rela­tion­ship with a face than a logo.
• Con: Peo­ple switch jobs, get fired, etc. Is your brand pre­pared to sud­denly change it’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive and is that per­son able to rebuild the rela­tion­ships the pre­vi­ous rep­re­sen­ta­tive had?

The Com­bi­na­tion

• Pro: You get the best of both worlds — the rec­og­niza­tion of a visual and the trust of a human face.
• Con: Sim­i­lar to hav­ing a brand rep­re­sen­ta­tive as your avatar. What hap­pens if that face isn’t a part of your brand any more?
• Con: If not exe­cuted prop­erly, it can look clut­tered and/or unprofessional.

Ulti­mately, both on the per­sonal and the brand side, the choice is yours. Every per­son is dif­fer­ent just as every brand is dif­fer­ent. What works for you might not work for some­one else. Just know that some­one else is judg­ing the cover of your book.