How important is your profile picture?

That’s kind of a silly question. In social media, your picture is incredibly important. It’s how people learn to spot your tweets or see if you’ve RSVPd for an event on Facebook.

Mari Smith and Tris Hussey, both people who know very well what they’re talking about, recently tweeted about the importance of having a picture that looks like you:

Trishussey: Tip for conferences: Use a good pic of yourself for Twitter etc. It’s easier to put a face with a name that way. Goes double for Facebook.

Marismith: Upload your avatar to http://gravatar.com Many blogs use Gravatar to pull in pics of commentors. Helps w/ visibility to have your pic.

Of course, I recently wrote a list of 21 ways to promote your business on Twitter where I recommended making your twitter icon your business logo. So which is it? Your business? Or yourself?

There is no hard and fast rule about what to do with your profile picture. If there were, this wouldn’t be much of a place for self-expression would it?

The truth is that what particular image goes up as your profile picture is largely irrelevant as long as you make the choice intentionally while being aware that this image:

Identifies you

This is what Tris is talking about. I’m sure you’ve all been through this process - you go out to a conference or a bar or a party and you meet someone who you really connected with. You’ve got their business card, sure, but this is the 21st century after all and it’s time to become friends online.

So you go to Facebook and Twitter and you search for their name, and up come three different results, all with tiny little thumbnail pictures and no other identifying information. Which one do you friend?

On the one hand, requesting the wrong friend could be embarrassing. You could go for the shotgun effect and request all three, then hope to figure out the right one later. Or you can squint a little bit and take a guess. This is what I usually do.

Having a clear picture of yourself is handy because people are incredibly good at remembering faces, even ones they’ve only seen once for a few seconds. But you can use any prominent and consistent image, especially if you have it printed on your business card. After all…

It is your brand

Your Facebook profile picture. Your Twitter icon. Your FriendFeed icon. These are all ways that people identify you online, which means that to a certain extent they represent your personal brand.

I recently wrote a post about personal branding and Twitter that grapples with the idea of personal branding online.

It’s up to individual companies how they want to deal with employee branding online, but in this case, it’s up to every individual whether they want their online brand to be personal or professional (and in some cases—like for Mari—it is both at the same time).

Regardless of which route you choose to go, the images…

Should be consistent

When you pull in to Chevron to fill up your gas tank, the logo looks pretty much the same, no matter which gas station you’re at in the United States (I can’t vouch for other countries). The McDonalds arches are the same all around the world.

Consistency is an important part of branding, because what you’re trying to build is recognition.

It’s a good idea to keep your images reasonably consistent across your social media tools. I do a poor job of this myself and I know it.

For a while I had an image of Phillip J. Fry as my icon everywhere except Facebook, and I’ve been slowly changing it out for pictures of me or the icon from Eat Sleep Publish.

As a side note, while I think that your Facebook profile picture really can be anything that identifies with you, I would not recommend using something like your logo there. Facebook is really about real identity, and logos look good in small formats (icons, twitter, friend feed) but terrible in large formats (like on your profile page).

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