Why An Avatar Is Important To Your Brand

With every social media profile you create, you are asked to add an avatar or an image to represent you. Some people take this for granted thinking that it’s just some image you need to upload to the site. But that should not be your mindset about avatars.

Like a face to a person you just met, your avatar is what makes the first impression. You know how sometimes you get a short sum-up of a person’s identity just by seeing their face? That’s the same thing with online viewers and avatars.

If you’re one who’s not too keen on avatars, you might want to keep this in mind: Your avatar represents your brand. So before you start throwing in some random caricature on your company’s profile page, you might want to think about these tips first:

Brand attributes
You need to thoroughly think about what best defines your brand. What characteristics would you like to project to your followers? Is the brand dynamic, youthful, in-your-face, or out of the ordinary?

Picking your avatar
When choosing the right image for your brand, look for one that speaks most of the attributes you’ve come up with for your company. Without a doubt, using an actual picture of you is the best choice. Using the company logo or a digital representation of you will work as well. Just make sure that the image you selected does not confuse or mislead your followers.

Enhance your image
I don’t mean altering it to a point that you’re no longer what you see in the image It’s more optimizing it in terms of size or adding certain digital effects to the picture. You have to understand that over-enhancing your image may lead to a misrepresentation which may end up with your customers losing their trust on your brand.

Always in every profile
Make sure that you put up an avatar every time you set up a profile on any social media site. You may also want to set up an image to attach to your email via Gravatar, so that whenever you post a comment using your email address, your image automatically uploads to the site.

Make more than one avatar image
You probably juggle a handful of social media profiles for your business. It doesn’t hurt for you to have 2 to 3 different avatars to use on different profiles or rotate the avatar images every so often. Think of it as keeping things fresh rather than simply being inconsistent.

Keep in minds that keeping a business profile without having any image to represent the brand can breed suspicion, skepticism, and doubt from people who come across it. You wouldn’t want that thought to cross your followers’ minds, do you?

What do you think?