If your job or current tasklist includes building a social media strategy for your organization (or yourself, personally), you should be thinking about the branding created by the profiles you create. The profile name, the image you use as an icon or avatar, the webpage you link to and the words you use to describe yourself have a significant impact in how you're perceived and how you're remembered across the web.
Strategies for Choosing a Name
The name you choose should be based on branding considerations, SEO and reputation management intent. Choose the name of your profile based on your carefully thought out goal for social media participation (and if you don't have one, get to work!):
- Company Branding
- Use the exact brand name of the company, not a modified version, a play on words or a name you picked for fun. If you're going to be representing your brand officially in these spheres, you need to craft a profile that does just that. It doesn't mean you can't show personality or be fun with your profile, it just means you need to make it extremely clear that this profile IS your brand.
- Consider adding a geographic or specific modifier only if this is part of your branding goal (for example, Utah SEO PRO). Because anyone can make a modified version of your name, you should also invest in owning the exact match brand name to be sure there's no confusion (and, if possible, mention the profile you use in the exact match name).
- Personal Branding
- First and last name must be included. Speaking from personal experience, if I could go back in time, I would alter all my profiles to be "Rand Fishkin" rather than "randfish." It seemed fun at the time (2001), but in retrospect, my full name would bring far more recognizable branding and credibility through those profiles, back to a personal brand. I can't enumerate the number of folks who, offline, made the sudden connection that "randfish" and "Rand Fishkin" were one in the same - a clear sign of missed branding opportunity.
- If your name is exceptionally long or difficult, you can consider shortening or modifying, but make sure it's something you're comfortable using in the real world as well. Remember that this advice is targeted towards professional use of social media campaigns, so if you're just in there for fun, you don't need to worry about this nearly as much.
- Boosting Search Rankings
- Choose relevant, non-cannibalizing keywords and phrases to put in the name. You don't want to directly compete with your own site on the keywords you're pursuing - you just want the profile pages to have some keyword relevance (and oftentimes, the profile name is the only keyword opportunity you get in the title tag on social sites).
- Make sure it makes sense, sounds reasonable and doesn't come across as spam. No matter how much effort you put in, if the name is "student-credit-card-dude," no one will trust you or want you around.
- A diversity of profiles may seem wise, but in reality, you may be able to draw far more link juice and value by contributing more significantly with fewer accounts.
- Pro-Active Reputation Management
- Use the brand name and possible combination keywords to build phrases that make sense and can fill up important or risky search results.
- Make sure to be extremely careful and non-provoking as you participate - aggressive or antagonistic behavior can turn a pro-active reputation management campaign into a defensive one very quickly.
- Re-Active Reputation Management
- Consider using names synonmous with but not exactly your brand name. The reason is to avoid having responses to negative comments repeat the keyword of your brand name more times in the copy or having complaints about your profile come up in brand searches.
- If you are representing yourself, be clear about it - if web users smell a rat, they'll pounce, and you could end up exacerbating the reputation management problem.
Strategies for Choosing a Profile Image / Avatar
- Company Branding
- Use the logo. If the logo won't fit, use the most recognizable aspect of the logo that fits into square dimensions
- If all else fails, go with the first letter or an Acronym for the brand name
- Personal Branding
- Use a picture of yourself - a head shot, with your face as close up, visible and friendly as possible.
- Make the photo fit your personality. Even if you're going for a very professional profile, having a smile and a polo vs. a somber face and tie is OK. As with many things on the web, there's a certain respect for the more casual and approachable profiles, but don't miss the opportunity to brand visually.
- Boosting Search Rankings
- It's probably best to use a photo that's cute, funny or enticing without being directly associated with your brand or you personally. After all, if you go overboard initially or learn the ropes by testing the boundaries of what you can accomplish from a pure rankings perspective, you don't want that possibly negative branding reflecting back on you.
- As others aruond the web (and in presentations) have noted on this topic, using an image of an attractive, younger woman on social sites can produce more interaction, more "friending" requests and a greater level of acceptance. I personally think it's a sad example of sexism on the web, but my responsibility on the blog is to note valuable strategies, and this one certainly can deliver.
- Pro-Active Reputation Management
- As with company branding, using the official logo is a generally wise move here.
- Re-Active Reputation Management
- Using a photo that helps humanize you as an individual and your company can help - a group photo, a picture with your kids, significant other, on vacation, etc. One of the big problems in reputation defense is getting the opposing party to empathize, and this strategy can help start down that path. Now is not the time to be the faceless corporation.
I'll let others tackle advice about how and where to link and how to optimize the descriptive elements of a social media profile page for maximum value (or maybe Jane can do it next week) :-)
Also looking forward to your feedback about how you've had the most success with social profiles.
Wait, Rand Fishkin is also randfish? It's like the scene in Lois & Clark where Dean Cain takes off his glasses and it suddenly clicks for Teri Hatcher.
Sorry, tangent there - I agree totally. It always amazes me when people use silly names or jokes for their profiles/avatars. I mean I saw one bloke who had some awful pink background...
The only thing I might disagree with is the full name thing - if you're blessed with a stupid, sorry unique name, then I see nothing wrong with attempting to own the first-name online.
I pretty much own ["Lord Manley] (I do not use my first name at all in the real world, outside of signing cards to my grandmother) and I generally posted everywhere under that name, until I started having to actually behave like a grown up (some time around my third of a century), at which point I stopped posting nonsense under that moniker and made up a silly joke name which I would not openly share, since that name does stuff I might not want clients to associate with me.
I think it is worth having more than one online identity but agree that the closer to unique your name is, the better.
ciaran, Rand said to use your actual face, not the comic.
You're still one of my heroes.
You're lucky, you're pretty.
Great avatar
Good article. (Although, if you read Chris Brogan, we're now not supposed to be thinking about branding anymore. ;) ) Having an illustrated portrait as your avatar does have some advantages for personal branding--at the scale of most avatars, individual faces in regular photos get a little harder to discern. My "disneyfied" self looks pretty consistent at all sizes.
A compromise I made recently was to take a picture that was as deliberately similar to the illustration as possible to use in places where a real photo is preferable. Both images have a "thoughtful" look--because that's the brand I'm trying to build.
Another thing to consider in personal branding on the social web is building a portable personal brand. It's pretty unlikely you'll spend your entire career at the same employer. Building brand equity in your own name and expertise means that you come to a new employer with that as a valuable asset. Even if you're an entrepreneur, clear separation of your personal brand and your business is a smart idea.
Thanks for the great article.
There are some good points made here by KatFrench - I was going to ask people how "personal" they make their online profiles, one consideration being the avatar amongst many (tone, amount of information, kind of information etc). I think the illustrated version of yourself works well by being personal enough to represent a human, but not so personal that you're showing too much of yourself.
Also, the point about personal branding is a great one. I've just started a new job in Marketing and part of my job will be to optimize the company website. I am also doing some contract SEO work in my spare time for another company and I've gone down the route of establishing some things in the SEO world as my own brand/persona rather than either of the companys', which I hope is the right way to aproach it. This should also leave some scope to move into if I want to do more contract work in the future.
i was thinking about something related the other day. say you have built up profiles with your name and then have your name legally changed (marriage, divorce or whatever). do you re-create all your profiles and start from scratch or just keep going by the old name? if you keep going by the old name online then do you carry that over into your entire professional life as well? has anybody here dealt with this before?
(ps i'm not getting married or divorced, just curious)
To avoid that exact situation, my wife decided to keep her pre-marriage name because she had established her identity within an industry. Had less to do with her online persona than it did her professional persona, but it's the same thing.
To address your question, I would think a 'Pro-Active Reputation Management' plan would be advisable here.
In case of divorce, a change is probably inevitable given most of those situations.
At one time, I was using my full name, which includes my maiden name as a middle name.
Unfortunately, "KatinaBeckhamFrench" is a rather ridiculously long user name. I've since decided that even if I were to ever ditch my husband, I'm keeping his last name--it's cooler than mine. ;)
How weird would that be in a pre-nupt? "Wife reserves the right to keep husband's shorter and more brandable last name in the event of dissolution..."
Yeah, that's actually reason #2 for my wife not taking my last name . . . not so cool, unless you actually know where Staines is - in the UK - but she does have a mean Brittish accent she can turn on and off!
Yeah.. a close up of your face does helps in personal branding... but what about the Yellow shoe branding principle? Does that help too? :)
Unfortunately, I got started in the pre-internet days when there were secret BBS's that required to hide your real identity at all cost. Calling someone by their real name was equivalent to extortion - outing them.
The tranformation from a pseudonym culture to a "Real name" one has been interesting. There's a whole new culture online of politeness, transparency, not flaming people to death over little things.
Bottom line, if you're interesting enough, people will still know who you are. DoshDosh / MakiMaki uses a few different names and avatars - and he doesn't follow conventional branding advice... but people know who he is.
Who?
;)
I've been inspired by this article to finally post my real picture as opposed to my simpsons avatar. Behold!
And I've gotta say, it's harder for someone who completely changes their hair color on a bi-annual basis to choose an avatar they're going to stick with for the longhaul!
This is an interesting topic for this blog particularly, since SEOmoz is so much about helping SEOs/SEMs educate themselves, and you have to ask yourself at what point do you want to start branding as opposed to researching and learning and asking the inevitable noob questions.
I shadowed for about a year and then got the PRO subscription over a year ago now and I'm still a bit reluctant to disclose the company I work for as well as my real name since the evidence is here that a year ago I had no idea what I was doing.
But, my real picture is step one. Thanks to resources like this and obsessive amounts of time spent reading them, (and having graduated college and being able to spend a lot more time with them) I'm more and more confident in my abilities. The results I've been getting for my clients also helps bolster that confidence. :)
Long story short: Thanks SEOmoz!
One more piece of advice...don't change your avatar unless there is a darned good reason to do so. Though it might be cool to tint your Twitter avatar pink or green, or change your photo every week, it makes it much harder for people to find you and pick you out of the crowd.
Although I didn't turn my Twitter avatar pink, I don't think it's all that much harder to differentiate between the people that did. Changing avatars for no good reason isn't advisable, but putting a filter on your established avatar isn't that big a deal to me.
One of the most popular blogs I've written recently has been the longhornkate vs katemorris post. I even have people asking if they should "pull a longhornkate."
I got some great advice on both sides and ultimately ended up with a balanced approach to moving to my name. Right now my domain is longhornkate, but katemorris is redirected. Once I get some time to clean things up, I'll switch that. Switching twitter was confusing at first, but most people have caught on. And I registered longhornkate again and posted a direction to follow @katemorris instead, just in case.
Branding you is important, its how you are introduced. A screen name is awesome, especially if its your company, but if it's not, like most of us, best to keep with your name.
I have to confess that when I started out (not long ago, I'm still very green!) my objective was to learn, rather than brand and so consequently my profile names are somewhat ill thought out, and they do change on various networks. If I could start all over again, I would perhaps think a little more carefully!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this Rand, I look forward to future posts on this.
this info has come just handy at a time when I was starting to think too often how much my social media profiles could affect my future personal or company brand. thanks for the insights.
I'm just getting into this whole social media thing (probably missed the boat a little) and this is all useful information!
Just one small thing - you have a typo "As others aruond the web"
A friend encouraged me to create a MySpace page for my company. I hesitated and then decided to give it a try. I made the profile name my company name included with about 5 descriptive keywords. Even after having just three friends, I noticed our company website's ranking on some of those keywords go up drastically. LinkedIn also returns good results since I changed my personal profile name on there to include my company's keywords. But it wasn't nearly as effective. I keep my facebook profile strictly personal but can't imagine much instant boost in ranking like I got from MySpace since it's closed.
FWIW - When I "pulled a @KateMorris" it was a great thing, have had much positive results from moving my twitter name from @Web_Guy to @JackLeblond
Excellent article. I know that for me I have been asked for advice on the same topic. This will help me out and my team at https://main10.com
As others aruond the web (and in presentations) have noted on this topic, using an image of an attractive, younger woman on social sites can produce more interaction, more "friending" requests and a greater level of acceptance. I personally think it's a sad example of sexism on the web, but my responsibility on the blog is to note valuable strategies, and this one certainly can deliver.
Thats the sad truth.. and many people create fake profiles to get d undue advantage.
Branding is of utmost importance in the internet age and I agree 100% with your suggestions.
as a learner in early stage of social media activity I made so many mistake, I even can not rectify them, one of them is user name is different in every social media website and have no meaning what so ever, I just choose what was more convenient for me. Nice article. If I can go back I will replace my imran033 with some thing more meaning full either for company or for myself
Great article Randfish.
This is an area I'm currently looking into myself, the importance of business branding should never be under estimated in my opinion.
Interestingly though as I am learning from my own weblog there are alternative startegies that can do surprising well from a business point of view.
Two additional points regarding the avatars and profile images:
1. It helps if they are consistent across the different social/profile sites, people will recognize you more easily from one place to the next.
2. IMO a unique avatar that people can pick out can be helpful in establishing your presence within an online community that you participate in. I will probably change my avatar when I start interacting with you people face to face, but for now, I feel I'm better off with the consistent and recognizable image to the left. Thoughts?
Great article Rand. I've been trying to build my Social Networking profile for quite a while. It takes a lot of effort and time, but I think it's ultimately very worthwhile. Thanks for the tips, I'll try a few out.
RE: Avatars for personal
I started out with my super sexy, super controversial avatar, but there wasnt a hidden agenda behind it, it represented my two major likes (:P). However, I cant but help think that despite some of the rare knowledgeable things I say would have been missed if that avatar didnt bring attention to the comment, and I am grateful to it. It wasnt sexist, but I know it comes across as being as such. Sexism exists, but its in the mind, and I for one would blame it on the other person if they saw me as sexist, as I am anything but :P
So yes a young pretty female avatar does grab attention, but you have to convinced that you WONT create a presence that brands you in a negative way.
But the interest in the "sexiness" last only so long as the comments and your contribution makes sense, engages people and shows a real personality behind it. Now, I can show my ugly mug and not be worried about it. I think I have crafted my online personality well, even if it was by mistake!
Another thing I like to do to keep things fresh is to play with the avatar, and in the past I have done many silly things with mine... this month I have gone pink with a bow tie...
Great article randfish.
I really need to do far more when it comes to social media, but struggling to get myself started.
Garbage Article----Does anyone ever say that to you Rand?
Like usual with the information on seomoz.... very informative, detailed yet concise and very understandable = of course great article.
Great, now he tells me.
At this point I still enjoy the look on peoples faces when the light comes on, "Oh you're That Guy!"
I was going to write something clever here but now I have to find a different picture. damn
My son has told me that when he is out in the club scene he knows when someone knows him from his online profile because he goes by his first and middle name there. It has been an interesting test of exposure.
Personally, I am okay with most people not knowing me by face. So I guess the next thing to work on is the logo.
As always another great post, Thanks Rand.