When it comes to profile photos, size matters.
When it comes to profile photos…
…size matters
I talk a lot about profile photos, and for good reason.
As I’ve mentioned several times in the past, your profile photos across your entire online presence, whether it’s your social media accounts or professional member organizations, are your digital introduction to those you serve.
They say hello to potential clients on your behalf without you saying a word.
That hello is translated through confident and approachable aspects of your personality written on your face through your expression.
That’s why it’s critical you choose an image that makes a warm and welcoming first impression.
That’s also why you need to make direct eye contact with your viewers.
Give them a chance to connect with you eye-to-eye so that they can immediately qualify you and determine whether or not they want to get to know you better.
That’s the easy part - here’s where it gets a little tricky when choosing profile photos.
Let’s say you have two photos that you really love from your session and are trying to figure out which one makes more sense as a profile photo for your social media accounts.
Both show you looking into the camera and exhibit confident, approachable, warm and welcoming expressions.
One of them is a tighter cropped photo, a headshot, and another is a wider photo, a standard portrait.
Jess did a great job presenting approachable aspects of her personality in both of these images, so the hard part was achieved.
My suggestion to her when we reviewed these images together was to leverage the tight headshot for her profile pictures on social and the wider shot to be used in other places.
Why?
When it comes to profile photos, we’re dealing with a limited amount of pixels in an oval or rectangular orientation. As a result, it’s important to fill that small space with as much of your face as possible.
Remember, it’s the first thing that your audience sees when they’re introduced to you so they need to see your face, facial expression and eyes very clearly in order to create an accurate first impression.
If you were to leverage the wide shot here, your face would be hard to see within the overall image. They’d have to click on the image in order to truly see your face. While that doesn’t seem like a big deal, any way that you can eliminate any potential points of friction in your audience’s get-to-know-you process, do them.
Does this mean that the wider portrait is useless? Absolutely not.
It simply means that this photo would be better served somewhere else in your online presence.
One place that immediately comes to mind is your website, and in particular, your About page.
The reason is simple: on a website page, you have ample space to lay out the image and the viewer of that image will be able to consume it as a whole, and not within the tight restrictions of an oval or rectangle profile photo.
There is no added clicking involved - they go to the page and it is in full view once the page has fully loaded on their phones and/or desktops.
Other potential ways to leverage the wider portrait shot:
Speaker submissions and podcast promotional images
Social media content post
Slides for virtual/in-person keynote presentations, webinars and workshops
Digital ads promoting a service or product offer
Printed materials such as postcards and booth displays
Now, could you crop the wider shot to be a more tightly cropped profile picture?
Technically yes, you could, and some of my clients have opted for that route in the past. But here’s why you shouldn’t.
You’re burning a portrait that could be leveraged as a full-length photo somewhere else. Rather than show off a flattering head-to-toe portrait of yourself, you’re cropping out all of that juicy goodness in order to show off your facial expression.
That’s why it’s important to capture a variety of wide shots and close-ups during your branded lifestyle portrait session.
You can easily prepare in advance to capture this visual variety and get exactly what you need, image asset-wise, rather than retrofitting after the fact.
This is why I remind my clients to bring a variety of outfits to sessions so that one outfit can be leveraged as a tightly cropped headshot, while another look can be used for a wider, looking-into-the-camera portrait photo.
Keep all of this in mind the next time you prepare for an upcoming portrait session, so that there is no scrambling after the fact to choose the right profile photo to be used across your entire online presence.
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