From the course: Guy Kawasaki on How to Rock Social Media

Pick a good avatar

- My next piece of advice about how to rock social media is you need to pick a good avatar. You need some put some effort into avatar. If you think of social media as online dating, there's two kinds of online dating websites. At one extreme there's eHarmony, fields of psychographic information because you're going to find your soulmate and you're going to walk hand in hand on windswept beaches for the rest of your life. At the other extreme of online dating there's Tinder, swipe right, swipe left, hot or not, right? Well, I hate to tell you but social media is Tinder. So you need a really great avatar. The purpose of the avatar is not to tell your life story. The purpose of the avatar is to simply convince people that you are competent, that you're likable, that you're trustworthy. So this means you should focus on your face. It should be only your face. Make sure this picture's front lit, that the light is from the front, not from the back. You don't want your face in the shadow. You should make it asymmetrical. Don't make it look like a mugshot in the post office. Put your eyes off to a side, don't make it dead smack in the middle. And the next thing is, if you want a great avatar, take a picture that's dedicated to being the avatar. Don't find some picture from your winter formal and crop your face out of it, because when people click on your avatar, it's going to zoom out to the larger size, it's going to be totally pixelated if it's a small piece of a big picture. Spend the time, take your iPhone, take your android phone, take a good smart phone, take a great picture. Front lit, asymmetrical, and big.

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