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02.20.09 Giving Thought To Your Site Avatars  By David Leonhardt If you include social media marketing as part of your online marketing strategy, give a little thought to your avatar. Actually, give a lot of thought. Overlooked as they are, they can be crucial to your branding strategy. With Avatars are those little images that go beside each post you author at websites like Digg, Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace and even beside comments in this blog. In some places, they are called profile pictures or something like that. But look at all the variety of choices you have...         Why avatars are so crucial is because they are like your online logo on every social media website you participate in. If you Tweet or connect for fun and recreation, who cares? But if marketing and business is important to you, below are 10 guidelines on how to optimize your avatars for maximum affect. Note that these are "guidelines", not rules. It might not make sense for you, in your particular situation, to follow all of them, but if you follow none of them, you are probably blowing it big time. Not all the avatars above follow all the guidelines, but they all follow most of them. As you read the list below, let your cursor slide over the images; I have added some notes in the alt and title attributes.  1. Let's start with the basics. Don't leave your avatar blank or go with a default avatar. The image it will leave people with is that you don't know what you are doing, that you might just be a spammer, that you have something to hide or, perhaps worst of all, no impression - you've wasted a chance to brand yourself.
2. Your face is the ideal logo. In social media, people don't want to interact with a company; they want to interact with a real person. Remember that social media is like a fusion of all the occasions when you might be speaking informally with people - around the water cooler, at trade show receptions, at the pub down the street, at networking meetings. In the real world, nobody wants to speak with a faceless company; they want to speak with a human being. Online people are still people; they want to speak with real people. See what people think of face avatars here.3. The previous guideline is one that you might want to break in one very specific situation. If your social media strategy is strictly to broadcast information, you might want your avatar to be your company logo. Very few organizations can get away with this strategy, but some information-rich companies, such as newspapers or radio stations, do this very effectively. Here are avatars from two different media outlets, reflecting very different apporoaches to social media marketing: Continue reading this article. About the Author: David Leonhardt is a Canada-based SEO and viral marketing consultant. He operates in English, French and Spanish, providing custom SEO programs for clients aiming to be top players in their niches. http://www.seo-writer.com/blog/ |
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