An important part of building brand awareness is image awareness. Like the golden arches of McDonald’s you want your face to be recognized as an expert. When people see your face, you want them to instantly say, “Yes! I know that person.”
Recognition builds association, which builds greater credibility.
The more your target audience sees you in different places and doing different things, the greater the image of “Oh my, that person is everywhere. They must be much more important than I realized!”
A photo tip is to use a unique personal image for different social applications. This way when your name is searched on Google, the page of images for your name will have more instances of “you” than images of other people with the same name.
When getting professional images taken, come prepared with different outfits and ask the photographer to use different background images. This way you get more mileage out of a single photo shoot. Use one shirt for Twitter, another for Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. Plan the outfit to match the platform you will be using.
When you share images on your blog or on social pages, make sure that you are in a significant number of them. People want to get to know you and the more you share your image the more they begin to link your name with your image. With today’s high face recognition technology you can be picked out of a crowd, but even so, include your name in the saved image format. It will ensure that your image does not get passed over or connected with someone else. Make sure you change the image name slightly such as yourname_athome.jpg or yourname_atwork.jpg so that it will show up uniquely in searches.
A final tip for building brand awareness is to choose photos that match the image you want to portray the most. If you want to be seen as an expert business coach, then wear business clothes in some of the photos. If you want to be known as a parenting expert, connect with images of your children or doing home activities as well as more professional speaking or presentation images. And finally, if you want to promote your latest book – why not get it in the picture?
