Five web profile tips for newbies
September 16th, 2009 by Mary Hamilton
This week’s web work has been almost entirely devoted to fleshing out profiles on various social networking sites – LinkedIn, Wired Journalists – and finally sorting out the blogroll (you can see it there on the right-hand side). Here’s five tips I’ve gleaned for people like me who are just starting up with creating social profiles.
- Create profiles on every site you think you might want to use. You won’t be able to (or want to) fill them all in straight away, but if someone says, “Are you on Facebook/Flickr/Friendfeed?” you want to be able to forge that link.
- Try to use the same name for every profile. Choose memorable aliases if your name’s already taken. You want to be easy to find and easy to identify wherever people are looking.
- Use the same avatar for everything, and make it recognisably you. Again, you want to be easy to find and identify, and you might want to forge multiple links across multiple sites and platforms with the same people. If possible, you want continuity and a stable image that represents you – and that people might recognise when they meet you in real life. (I use a stylised avatar rather than a photo because my hair is so curly that it confuses cameras and no good photos of me exist. Except for one on Facebook of me pretending to be Cthulhu. Bonus points for anyone who can find it.)
- Set aside a small amount of time every day for profile building. I mean a small amount – ten minutes perhaps. Don’t do it all at once – you’ll find yourself going back and re-doing things a lot because you’ve missed a link or done something you didn’t mean to, and you’ll get bored half to death filling in the same forms over and over again. Little and often takes some of the monotony away, and having a Zoominfo profile that consists entirely of your name and one job doesn’t matter for a few weeks, as long as you get there eventually.
- Keep going back. Bookmark your profiles and keep returning to them, even the ones you think are finished – chances are they will never be complete. Update your status, search for new connections and check on your existing ones. Again, little and often seems to be the key.
More tips for starting up and creating social media profiles? Disagree with my advice? Let me know in the comments.
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