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Facebook® Profiles Part 2

I can't talk about social media without talking about healthy, because so many of us post selfies. And so I've been collecting selfies and tips for doing selfie. So this is a photograph of my husband and I captured in the reflection of a window in Holland as we walked by and I just thought all that kind of fun and it just gave us kind of gave me something different to post on Facebook. So one of the challenges of regularly updating your social media is thinking of things to put there on a regular basis and in my observation, the best strategy, even if you use social media mostly for professional promotion. And that's definitely my main goal in social media is to promote my books, my work, my consulting. But I find that the personal things that I do put out there, even though I don't put a lot of personal things, the photos of me, the photos of me and my husband often get the most response. And so I'll talk a little bit about how surprising it might be that sometimes those more personal...

things actually get more butt selfie zehren. So this is a quick selfie I took with a friend of mine the other day. And the tip for this is always get the person with the longest arms to take the photo. Um, this is this is just to give you perspective on the size difference between my husband and I. He definitely has the longest arms. I've never actually really hit him, but, you know, because I couldn't even if I wanted to, um this, I thought was a particularly clever selfie I collected this years ago from my friend Teresa in Miami. Her Children are much bigger now, but what I love about this selfie is there, laying on the ground, and he's holding that over his head. So a lot of us think, you know, used to stand out and take the classic selfie. But don't forget that sometimes that looking up perspective. This is my friend Aaron Manning, who will be joining us in the next segment. I would call her the Queen of Selfies. She is a photographer photography instructor and she is brilliant at selfies. So I have several. And she was very generous to share them, but notice how she captured herself and her environment even the flip flops in the background. There was a lot of thought put into that selfie. A lot of us just think, you know, point the camera at your face and take a picture. But she added, some creativity to it shows me where she is. That hat and that wonderful thing behind her. Like I kind of owe your traveling. You're someplace interesting. It's not just a picture of your face again. There's something more here. Oh, you're running on the beach. No wonder you stay in such great days. Um, and don't forget mirrors. You know, you can always take selfies and mirrors often a great way to do that. So we all can do this? No. With with our phones with that reverse camera. But the mirror still a nice way to take a selfie. Uh, this is kind of amazing, But that photo is also a selfie. And you might say, Well, how did she take that selfie? She's in it, and she's obviously not holding the camera on. And so she shared this with me. It's a Sony lens, and I'm not trying to endorse a product. Don't work for Sony. But boy, the fact that you can put this lens with your phone and actually works off the phone. So she puts this lens on the other side of the room and then uses her IPhone to take photos of herself and others. I just thought that was the coolest way to do selfies ever, and I had to share it. So it's the DST Q X 100 or the DSC Q X 10 that amount on your smartphone. You can look it up yourselves. It's I know it's not cheap. I think it's a couple $100 maybe, um, but if you're trying to photograph or video yourself, which a lot of us two for YouTube, for self promotion boy, that's a pretty powerful little thing. And being able to see yourself in the IPhone while you do it, that really frees you up to be able to do a lot of things yourself that we used to need a whole team of people, or at least somebody else behind the camera to do for us. I was pretty impressed with that just to bring that home cause I asked her for that. She took these yesterday on Mother's Day of her and her mom using that lens. So e just thought that was kind of fun. But again, you can see she's got that lens further away than her arm would allow on. I thought that was kind of selfies, one of my all time favorite selfies. Remember, it doesn't have to include your face. I had to do that to These are my feet. Those were Aaron's fever. These are my feet at Zuma Beach. Every once in a while, I actually remember that I live close to the ocean. I should leave my computer behind. Go look at it. Oh, so that made a great Facebook post right here. I am finally doing this. That got a lot of love on Facebook and very simple. Easy way to just kind of let people know where you are in a way, this I would call the best surreal selfie I have yet found with halos Permission I'm using. This is a self portrait of him, and I really like if I back up for a second how he used that in the cover image. This is the cover image on his Twitter profile and then the little image as well, so it kind of repeats. And even though there's a little overlap and it varies, it still works. Um, but that's just kind of a cool selfie, so selfies don't have to be photographs. I do recommend that you try to make yourself recognizable. You'll hear me say that a lot, and we'll talk some more about that. But hey has a whole piece on Hiss website about how he created that image and what that means to him. But remember, there lots of ways to present yourself. And ultimately, I think the most successful, effective profile designs are ones that help tell your story. So soon as I get to that profile, I go, Oh, this guy's an artist and he's kind of a surrealist, and I know a lot about him before I even know his name right? Just by looking at those images. This is my Uncle Tom. Um, and I will tell you I'm about to give Jim some grief for using a sketch of himself. And in general, I think images like this as a profile photo can be problematic because it's hard to tell what Tom looks like. That is Tom on the bicycle in the cover photo. He lives in the Midwest, but Tom's a cartoonist and an artist. That's what he does, and he's. Anybody who knows him knows that this kind of quirky little drawing really represents kind of how he sees himself and his playful sense of the world growing up with him. I remember things like the van that he drove that had little round, colorful stickers stuck all over the outside, and he told us that he drove through a rainstorm of M and M's. And then later, when people started get phones in their cars, he took one of those old phones with the rotary dial in, glued it to the dashboard. So it's just a quirky creative guy. When he got married, he wore a Hawaiian shirt because that's what he wore. And there were 30 other people at his wedding in Hawaiian shirts because that's what we were. So if that's your personality, if that's what people know you for than a playful profile, image like this probably is the right thing. But for most of us, that can be very confusing to people, and this is where I'm gonna pick on Jim so week or so ago, I got kind of fun. New tool in a toll toy. Too little toy. It's a drone. I ordered a drone, Right. Okay, it's about this big, and it flies around with a camera on it. And that freaks some people out. We won't go into the politics of whether drones should be allowed or not in local airspace. I'm going to take it to Chile for a speech I'm doing on technology trends in journalism and how one of the things journalists are starting to dio is to use these little quad crop copter drones with a camera on them. Because, frankly, helicopters air prohibitively expensive and a few 100 bucks for a drone is a pretty good deal. So I posted that I was all excited about my new drone. And what did you write on it? Do you remember? Oh, I remember. Yes, because we have We have actually a drone class coming up here creativelive being taught by whatever after effects instructors Jeff Foster And so a lot of our instructors have drones. And Jeff as Juan and Colin Smith has one chase. Has Jace has one, and of course you know Janine posted. She got her drone. I was like, Oh, when are these instructors gonna stop droning on about their new fancy toys? So I thought that was pretty funny. And my husband thought it was pretty funny when he started kind of snarking back in, but he didn't realize who you were. And if you see your face, if he'd seen your photograph And I know you've actually we were just talking about this. You actually updated it last night. If anybody wants to go to your Facebook base today, they'll see an actual photograph of you, and that's usually what you have. But he knows your face from having seen you on creativelive. He knows your face as you know, somebody that I love interacting with and being snarky on my page. They could tell you are being silly, but he would have been even more enamored by it. If you've known who you were and just glancing at that little sketch of you, it was very hard to tell. Maybe if there had been a bow tie drawn in. So if you're somebody who's known and anybody who watches creativelive a lot and has seen Jim a lot knows he often wears bow ties. That would have been a great clue and maybe even a bow tie that was very colorful because you tend to wear very colorful bow ties, right? So absolutely. If there's something distinctive about your personality, if you're known as a cartoonist, if you're known for wearing bow ties, then being a little playful with your profile image once the oil is great, but the bottom line I keep coming back to us. Can I tell you you are? Are you gonna fend? My husband especially go snarky on other people's well, he starts something back. I'm trying to remember what it was. I guess I could pull up the whole exchange. A couple good puns himself. Yeah, I had to come back with some terrible puns himself. He couldn't resist. So I don't mean to call you out, So please do, Please. It's a perfect case study. Why having a recognizable image can be helpful. Um, and, uh, yeah, I will be taking that drone class because I'm still a little intimidated. There's sort of two parts to the challenge of flying a drone. One of them is that you really can't take your fingers off with them. They're you know, they're serious rotors to be able to lift a camera off the ground that high, but you also can fly them into the wall and break them pretty easily. So I'm trying to find the balance between hurting myself and hurting the drone. And I have to practice enough to be able to fly it over the heads of an audience in Chile and not kill anybody. I might start an international incident. E o E. Wish me luck with that, but I'll be recommending that drone class foreshore. So again, using this photo in just showing recognisable design elements across your profile and making sure that that profile image works in a square in a circle and a longer form if that's allowed on some profiles and then professional photos. You know, sometimes you need a more professional image, but that doesn't mean you can't be a little playful. Shaun's being kind of, you know, that's kind of interesting. It's professional enough for Lincoln, but it's still kind of playful. Dana Underwood Some of you know him because he works here. Creativelive. He's behind the scenes, but he's fabulous. I just love. That smile just jumps out and the way it's tightly cropped, so you really see his face up close. It's a very professional image, but it's a very eye catching image. And on Lincoln, where you have so little space to really get somebody's attention very recognizable, very impactful makes If I didn't already know what a warm, huggable, brilliant person he was. This would make me want to know that. So, like I said, experimenting is great. But be aware that your experiments are public and this could be a little shocking. One of the reasons that you might appreciate having the templates and all of the different lines in there and where things are gonna line up is you don't have to do that yourself, because every time you put up a new photo, it's probably gonna be public. Different sites handled this differently. Lincoln used to actually announce to everybody. If you changed your profile or your title, it would be like, Oh, you got a new job. Congrats like No, I just changed my title. You know, that was confusing the people. Well, when you update things on Facebook, they get posted a swell so I'll just give you a quick story about a client online. Curry Anderson And she's gonna join us tomorrow. As I mentioned had, uh, this is the website that she had last year, and we designed a Facebook profile to go with it. This year. She updated that design to kind of simplify her message, become a little clearer, and she wanted that on Facebook. So she gave me the access to log in and put that up on Facebook as happy to do that for. And then she was like, Oh, I didn't realize it would go up as a post. She's very cautious about not looking overly self promotional, and I really respect that. I think updating a profile photo once in a while and having it show up like a post updating your profile. Picture your cover photo once a week, once a month, once every six months. Very reasonable. But beware if you're experimenting and you put one up and you're not quite right, and you put another one up, you're quite right. And you put another. Those are all gonna go off his post, and that really can looks family. If you do 12 of them in a row. So get your testing offline. Experiment off line, you know, take a screenshot and kind of test how it's gonna look. Here's my templates to kind of figure out where those lines should go. But try and get pretty close to where you want it to be before you upload it. Or you may end up kind of scaling people with that. That said, you can go back and control who can see your old cover photos. This is a relatively new thing on Facebook. There are all kinds of privacy settings in Facebook you can control. Who can post your page, Who can, Who can friend you who can't. You have all kinds of levels of access, but it used to be that cover photos if you put them up there, were available to the public no matter what, and your main cover photo that's currently active is public. Pretty much I don't think there's anything you can do to control that you can now go back and change the privacy. UN. Previously published cover photos. If you want to hide those for some reason, not sure, you know, if your photographer, I think It's actually nice to have the gallery of images there and and leave them available. But that's a new thing that wasn't there before, so I just thought I would throw that in a za tip. Um, the other tip is how much love you can get for a photograph of yourself. So when I changed Caray's profile photo, it also posted as if it was for her. And she got, you know, more than 150 likes and 20 some comments on that very quickly, and I have been astounded that I will post thoughtful things. I will post helpful things. I will post tips the things I think are useful, and then you will put some silly snapshot of myself up there. And that's what people love. You're seeing a picture of something like my friend Anisa looking so warm, so inviting, so beautiful, and you just want to like, you know, there's something a about seeing a beautiful, smiling face that most of us respond to. And if I'm just clicking through Facebook, I admit it. I'm very quick toe like pictures of my friends, and that seems tohave an unusual. If you want your called score to go up if you want, you know, to This is funny, but two of the best things for your cloud score. Updating your profile photo? Not every day, maybe once a week. I think profile photos. More like monthly every six months. But but updating them regularly and then your birthday. Awesome for your cloud score. Birthdays are awesome for cloud scores because everybody comes with wishes. You a happy birthday. That's great. But don't be afraid when you update that profile that is gonna show as a post and think, Oh, this looks kind of spammy. Actually, that can be very popular. I change this profile photo in preparation for this class. Just have something fresh there within 20 minutes. 24 minutes after I posted it, I had 25 lakes. I was gonna update the next Oh, yeah. Uh, about 24 hours later, I had more than 200 likes on this one picture, and I've posted this before. Be replacing it with one from before just to have a fresh one this week. So quite astounding to may the kind of love you can get on but the rial lesson is it is public when you do it. So I wouldn't put 10 up in a row. Or maybe do it midnight one in the morning, depending on how many international friends you have another times of.