Social media profile tune-up

- [Instructor] Whether you're asking for reviews or giving reviews, by posting online, people will see and click on your profile. They may do this for a variety of reasons, including to verify the credibility of a review you left, or they may just be curious about who's behind the business that you're asking them to review. You never know who may be clicking on your profile, which is why it's so important to ensure that your profile looks professional and is up to date. This is true for both personal profiles and business pages. Here are the three basic things to tune up your profile and update your social media presence so you're putting your best foot forward online before you even start asking for reviews. The first thing I always recommend is updating your contact information and about sections. Many times, I have had a need to contact a business, but their information isn't listed or isn't up to date. It's frustrating when I have to look all over the place to find out how I can reach someone by phone or email. Make it as easy as possible for customers to contact you. Being readily available in a day and age where customers want instant gratification is extremely important and valuable. The second thing that will help you establish a positive online presence is to have clear profile photos. I come across many profiles that have blurry photos of their business or profile photos that aren't professional. Since profile photos are the first thing people notice, this automatically gives off the impression that you're not making an effort to create a positive online presence. Here's an example of a LinkedIn profile where the person's photo is blurry. In fact, her face is even cut off. Now, her cover photo looks like it's a nice scenery of maybe a beach or a nature photo, but it's also blurry and pixelated, so I can't tell what it is. The last thing you want to keep in mind when tuning up your profile is to check your privacy settings. If you're on a personal profile, make sure you're only publicly sharing information that you're intending to. And if you're on a business profile, it's really important that your customers have an easy way to communicate and to access you. I've seen some business profiles where they don't allow people to contact them. Oftentimes, businesses may have people commenting and asking questions, and if these settings are turned off, it'll be difficult for someone to figure out how to contact you, especially when people want easy access on social media. On this LinkedIn profile, you can see that to update the privacy settings, I'm going to click on this button here that says Me on the top right corner. Once I click on that, the drop-down comes up for me to click on the privacy settings button. When I'm here, I can click on all different types of settings, including Sign in & Security, Visibility and Communications. I'm going to want to make sure to take time to check on all of these settings, to ensure that they're set up properly. Keep in mind that each site has their own privacy settings, so you'll have to go through this process on different sites, and it may look different than what I'm showing you here. The most important part, though, is that you do update your privacy settings before you start actively engaging in using your social media profiles. Once your profiles are tuned up and updated properly, you'll be ready to get out there to start generating positive reviews for your business.