Make a Great First Impression with Effective Social Media Profiles

Regardless of which Social Media, Social Networking or content sharing website you’re involved with, they all have user profiles, settings and options to configure that can help make it easier to connect with you online.

Make it a point this week to revisit your profiles on the social media sites you’re involved with to make sure you are taking advantage of their options and you have a keyword-rich compelling profile.  Start with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook profile and company pages,  LinkedIn personal and company profiles and remember that “keywords drive traffic”.

Social Media Marketing Profile Tips:

1. Do your research. Take the time to explore each SMM site and see what profiles you like and dislike and ask yourself, “Why?” Then look at your profile and put yourself in the mind of the visitor. Does it represent you and your brand properly?  Is it a disorganized mess or missing content?
2. Use your keywords. We’ve talked about this before, but it’s so important, especially when people are searching for topics, groups, people and solutions. Just like the first tip, search each site for your topic areas of interest and see what comes up. Then review their profile for hints on what you could model.  If you want to supercharge your keyword research go get my Keyword Secrets audio in the store. It’s 60 minutes filled with non-technical, valuable and relevant keyword research training that will help you select the best range of keywords in your sweet spot.. .not too much competition on the keyword phrase and you can capture all of the traffic.
3. Avoid sensationalism. People are smarter than ever before. And hype – blatant promotional efforts or sales tactics will most likely backfire or cause your account to be terminated altogether.  Again, don’t spam your users, followers or friends. Add value and they’ll figure out if they want to contact you for business.
4. Stick with regular formatting. Don’t use all CAPS or aggressive formatting tactics. Keep it clear and information benefit oriented.  Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.  I’m talking about using multiple fonts, many colors and sizes and making it hard for readers to get the point.
5. Create your own profile for your business or topic of focus. This account would be for you to use as your main business related account.
6. Create a private “persona” account. This can be an alias or private personal account that you can use to explore anonymously, test new features and keep confidential. It’s better to make a mistake with your persona account than it is with your main account. Accounts at most of the social media sites are free so this can be a way for you to learn the easy way.
7. Add links back to your website. As obvious as this may sound, it’s a common mistake business people make when using Social Media and setting up their profiles.

That’s all for now. Go visit your Social Media Profiles through the eyes of your prospects and then fix them with the proper keywords, content and links. Have other ideas or questions?  Post your comments in the reply box below. Thanks!