About Profile Pictures and Company logos

As my friend Joseph Botelho always says "Networking is a contact Sport" and he is right about that. Social media is about establishing good contacts with other people which can be achieved by being active in regards to posting content, comments that add value and of course to share content of others that you consider useful for others.

On social media your main focus should be on interacting, not selling and advertising. If you do that people will visit your profile. Your profile will do the selling for a large part and so does your profile picture once that people know you are sharing and promoting good stuff.

However people connect with people, not with company logos (or pets, children, cartoons, etc). In fact APSense does not allow it; it is unfortunate that those are sill being approved by members that have the privilege to approve profile pictures.

I fully understand that businesses socialize and are active with the objective to gain more customers and to earn some money. So i can understand that many upload their business logo as a profile picture in an attempt to brand their business.

As I pointed out a company (logo) is not you, even not when you are the sole owner. And people are more likely to connect with a person than with a logo.

So. How do you attach your face to your business?

It is not all that hard. Make sure you have a well set up profile with a picture of you as adult and list your business. Same goes for the APSense business center where you can submit pictures: your logo and product pictures. You can also pin these and/or use your logo or product pictures in articles and rev pages. All these pictures including the ones embedded in the RSS of your company blog will show on your APSense brand page 9 if you haven't got one yet, set one up today!).

Do all those thing and it won't be long for people attach your picture to a company.
The best example would be Wincer who is the founder of APSense. I think most people know his face and that he owns APSense and many other sites. He did not post his logo as a profile picture but through a lot of hard work and yet taking time to engage and interact with other members.

By using a logo as profile picture you are limiting yourself and closing doors!

Your face is yours and it will always be there and look the same (except maybe the color of your hair and some  additional wrinkles in the course of time).
A company logo is attached to 1 company. A face can be attached to multiple businesses and/or opportunities. I.e. I am owning a graphic design service, a traffic exchange and several others. In future I may be involved in Turkish real estate. I would restrict myself severely with branding on social media sites if i had either one up as a profile picture.

Yes, you may argue 'but I have only one company...'

But what if your company goes under, is sold or merges with another company under a new name? What if you are promoting an opportunity and that opportunity disappears or worse you find out much later that the opportunity was a scam? Such things happen all the time. Would you like to be branded as that logo? Once branded well it is hard to get rid of a certain image.

In the unlikely case that  a well known business ceases to exist i.e. APSense, I would I would not bother to click on posts showing the APSense logo as a profile picture knowing that the company was gone. I would however click on posts that has a profile picture of Wincer. Because I know him as a person and a skilled programmer and knowledgeable in many other internet marketing related fields.

I hope you all understand what I am trying to convey here. What I am saying is that people follow people and they do that mainly because they make them feel good. I read somewhere that some people are embarrassed to put their own picture up because they do not look like a Madonna or Adonis.

Let me tell you that I have many friends online and offline that objectively speaking are ugly as hell. But I love them an online I follow them because they make me feel good; they all enriched my live in one way or the other.