When you decide to get your brand on social media, often times there is a discussion about which image should be used as the profile photo. Should it be a real person because people like to engage with a brand where they know a real person is behind the profile, or should it be the logo so the people know they are engaging with the official brand and it also brings brand awareness. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
The answer is that it truly depends.
If your company has a spokesperson already, like Pete Cashmore is the front man for @Mashable or your Flo from the Progressive Insurance commercials, then it can make sense to have a personal photo as your avatar. But if you have no spokesperson and are not prepared to have one, then the logo is where you should go. In fact, if you really want to show off who is behind your Twitter profiles or Facebook profiles you can display them or give them props in different ways.
On Twitter:
Progressive Insurance showcases their team via their background photo.
Some people who tweet on behalf of a company, say so in their Twitter profile, like Comcast Bill.
Some companies create a list and call it out in their bio with a link, like JetBlue:
On Facebook
Facebook gives you the opportunity to highlight featured Page owners. To do so, go to Edit Page>Featured>:
Now, some companies choose to remain anonymous and very corporate not letting anyone know who is behind their Twitter account or Facebook Fan Page and there isn’t anything wrong with that either. In my research it didn’t seem to threaten the amount of engagement or interaction. But if a snafu comes up, it would be a lot easier to point the finger at a person rather than the company as a whole. (See Vodafone UK’s Twitter mishap)
How do you choose to showcase who is behind your company’s social media profiles? Do you showcase the team, or do you prefer it to be anonymous? Let me know in the comments below or take the poll.
Person or logo? Take the poll.
In our case, we are a young business firm and we are training ourselves in many different aspects of work within the company. For now we use our company logo but our bosses are also open to letting them know who we are behind the brand. They believe in accountability and taking ownership for things done. If we develop a following, the people would be able to track us down anyway if they look through our sites.
For small business we firmly believe that the avatar should be a person rather than a logo. Logos don’t often adapt well to the square format and can be difficult to see on a smartphone. For larger companies we would agree that circumstances and the companies own viewpoint would dictate which approach to use.