We’re sociable creatures these days aren’t we? We have profiles on Linkedin purely for business, accounts on other social media platforms for both business and our personal lives. Our websites aren’t complete without an ‘About Me’ page. In the past few years, doing business has become much more about getting to know the person you want to work with, before actually working with them.
But do you realise what a fabulous opportunity that gives you in terms of marketing yourself and your business? Studies show that the human brain takes in 55% of all its information visually – in other words, what we see is the most important factor in helping us to make up our mind about something. It’s how we’re wired up and have been for thousands of years. (If you want to do some research on this, google ‘Albert Mehrabian’, the UCLA Professor who studied the relative importance of verbal and non-verbal messages).
So, what does that all this mean for the profile that we post of ourselves? It means that our potential customers will look at it. And, it means that the first thing they’ll look at is the photo of you that you have chosen to include. Think about that for a moment. The most important part of any profile is the picture of you that you’ve chosen to use. Which means that that photo carries enormous power. Human beings make judgements very quickly based on what they see – so the picture that you present of yourself to the world needs to be carefully considered. But it also means there is a great opportunity to send a positive and powerful message. You can post a photo that shows how approachable you are; or how funny; or how determined; how sympathetic ……… whatever quality or qualities you want to convey.
By taking a little time to consider how you want to come across, and by employing a good professional (ahem!), you can make a powerful statement about yourself and, by extension, your business. Which might make the difference between someone getting in touch or not.
Here’s a quick slideshow of portraits that I shot last year. Some of the portraits were for PR use, or to go in articles, but plenty are profile shots. Please have a look (it’s only a minute long) and consider what the sitters were saying about themselves.
Of course, I’d love to shoot your new profile photo for you. It just needs a quick chat about where it’s going (different platforms might want different formats) and, as I’ve said above, some thought about which aspect of ‘you’ we’re going to put across. Give me a call or drop me an email if you’d like to talk about what it involves, or to get prices and availability.
