Blog

What Does Your Profile Picture Say About You?

How much time do you spend getting ready in the morning?

Whether you’re going to work or not, you want to make sure that you look good when you leave the house.  If your job or role involves meeting people face-to-face, then you’ll probably make a particular effort to appear presentable, to make a good impression.

So why does your Facebook profile picture show you across a table in a taverna on Cyprus, from that holiday in 2008?  Why do people looking you up on LinkedIn get that dull corporate image that your last-boss-but-one commissioned?  And why is your picture on Twitter cropped from a group shot at a wedding you can’t even remember going to?

“Facebook is becoming one of the de facto ways that we present ourselves to friends and family,” says Dr Bernie Hogan of Oxford University’s Internet Institute.  She says the social-media profile picture has become “the new calling card, the first point of contact.”  (Read more about this here.)  As we’re all so heavily involved in online interaction of various kinds, doesn’t this make it all the more important that your profile pic shows the person you really are?

This is about to get even more important, now that Facebook is going all Timeline on us.  Now we need ‘cover shots’ which appear as big banners at the top of our pages.  Pick the wrong one on your personal page, and your friends will roll their eyes in despair.  Pick the wrong one on your business page, and your clients will find someone else to deal with.

Take a look at the various pictures you use on your social-media profiles.  Do any of them represent not just what you look like, but the real you?  Do they show someone you’d want to hang out with, work alongside, talk to?

If you want to make a great impression with your profile, if you want an image that shows your personality not just your physiognomy, get in touch at engage@jimhawkins.co.uk.  You can see some recent examples of my work for social-media on the photo pages of this website.  If you like them, drop me an email and we can chat about working together.

One more thing: I bet you think about this while you’re getting dressed tomorrow morning … !