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Social media gives people a snapshot of a person or company, which can be powerful if you want to make a solid first impression. Ideally, these profiles summarize the most important facts and then give the viewer an easy way to dig deeper if they choose. Whether you're a marketer, executive, or sales professional, your profile sets the tone for how you're perceived online. A polished, well-optimized profile builds instant credibility, fosters trust, and can open the door to new opportunities. Here, we’ll look at how to optimize a profile so it’s likely to both show up in a search and hook the searcher’s attention.
Why Do Social Media Profiles Matter?
Social media profiles can help people find you, your employees, or your company. For companies, employee profiles can serve as powerful brand extensions. Once they navigate to the profile, a profile can enforce your brand’s values. For example, if you represent an environmentally-friendly CPG company on Facebook, you might infuse your profile with the most heavily searched keywords on the platform, so your name is more likely to pop up. You could then use each of the profile sections to illustrate how your company conserves energy or encourages sustainability.
For individuals, social media profiles can be a great way to highlight professional accomplishments alongside personal ones. Potential clients or partners often browse LinkedIn and other platforms to get a feel for your expertise and company culture. Whether it’s LinkedIn or Instagram, they can use these platforms to show off skills (and tag employers in the process).
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How to Improve Social Media Profiles
Improving social media profiles is not as intuitive as you might imagine. Here, we’ll look at not just standard social media profile tips but how to implement them more efficiently across platforms.
Address Every Section
This is a pretty basic rule, but profile sections are also easy to skip or overlook. Whether it’s a headline or About Section, a complete profile provides an accurate, comprehensive picture of the person or company.
Profiles should be jam-packed with helpful facts and keywords. Just keep in mind that people will read and absorb differently on a screen. Breaking up your text with different fonts, bullet points, and colors might make it easier for readers to skim (as long as it’s not overwhelming).
Adapt for Every Platform
If your customers, employees, and prospective employees turn to different platforms for different reasons (e.g., LinkedIn for professional networking and Twitter for news), it’s important to keep these facts in mind as you build your profile.
For instance, if you use your company’s Twitter account to post your latest position on the Dow, you might focus your profile on the value you bring to shareholders. If you use Facebook for brand awareness, your headline might provide broad-stroke descriptions of your company.
As you consider your approach for each platform, it’s equally important to devise a system for updating your profile as time goes on. Whether it’s once a week or once a month, you’ll want to check in on your profile for both accuracy and optimization. After all, it’s not just your company or employees that change; it’s also search patterns and customer priorities.
Choose a Banner and Photo
A banner and headshot are the first visual clues about a person or company, and it can be a powerful introduction when done correctly. If a person isn’t going to read ‘below the fold,’ this section really needs to count.
Your profile photo should be high-quality, professional, and approachable. Stick with a clear headshot where your face is centered and well-lit. This helps build trust and recognition, especially on platforms like LinkedIn where connections are often made without meeting in person.
Your banner image (or background photo) is prime real estate for telling your story. Choose a banner that reflects your role, company, or industry. This could be a branded image, a city skyline, a keynote moment, or something that subtly conveys your professional personality. Avoid generic or blurry images—they can dilute your brand presence.
Together, your profile and banner images shape how people perceive you before they even read a word.
Work on the Headline
Your headline is not the time to mince words. (While people might be intrigued by mysterious language, it’s too risky to rely on.) Headlines should be as concise as they are descriptive, especially if your company isn't well-known by the general public.
For a company, this is a good time to narrow down your unique selling points, whether you want to highlight quality, reliability, or creativity. For employees, there’s more leeway on the headline, with more opportunity to stretch into other descriptors or interests than just professional passions. For example, your CEO might describe themselves as a leader, father, and coffee aficionado.
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Fine-Tuning Employee Profiles
Experience, education, and certifications can all be listed in an employee’s profile. On professional platforms, like LinkedIn, these sections are more defined, making them easy to plug in certain details. However, even on accounts like Instagram, plenty of people are happy to share at least a few aspects of their work (especially if they're in a highly visual medium).
From volunteering to ongoing education classes, sharing this information gives everyone a more well-rounded idea of what the employee stands for. If you encourage your employees or co-workers to tag the company on social media, you might ask them to flesh out their profiles to include anything from skills to real-world accomplishments.
Fine-Tuning Company Profiles
As you fill out your company profile, keep the following in mind:
- Info: From your phone number to your service areas, your company’s basic information needs to be accurate, comprehensive, and clear to the reader. (If you’ve ever wondered what a company’s holiday hours are, you know how important these basics are.)
- Personality: Your profile can and should reflect your company’s people and priorities. You can invite customers to chat, share insights about your industry, and highlight your staff’s unique talents. As you add more team members, you can update your profile to reflect the newest talent acquisitions.
- Metrics: Nearly all social media platforms offer analytics to users so they can see how people engage with their profiles. Some, like Google, are more insightful than others. Regardless of which social media platforms your customers favor, make sure you’re using these metrics to make appropriate updates to your profile.
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Encourage Your Employees to Join In
Your employees can drive social media engagement in ways you might not have considered. After all, when they post, they invite their friends, family, and professional network to learn more or join a discussion. Your brand’s voice becomes exponentially more powerful when your employees are part of the conversation. When team members actively maintain strong social media profiles and share company content, it humanizes your brand and extends its reach far beyond your corporate channels. When you ask employees to optimize their posts or profiles, you can organically introduce your company, without using salesy or overly sensational language.
Encouraging employees to participate doesn’t mean handing them a script. Instead, you empower them to share authentic perspectives, industry insights, and company wins in their own voice. Provide guidelines, pre-approved content, and easy-to-use tools like Clearview Social’s employee advocacy software to make sharing seamless. As they get into the habit of integrating professional accomplishments on social media, including reposts of company content, it also encourages them to create a more balanced profile that touches on more than just their personal life.
Clearview Social simplifies the social media process with one-click sharing, AI-generated captions, and automated scheduling—making it easy for even your busiest employees to participate. With built-in gamification and engagement tracking, it turns social media into a team effort that drives real results. Ready to amp up your social media profiles? Schedule a demo today!
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