This is an excerpt from my ebook, Social Splash. Purchase for $29 to learn more social media goodness!

Your social media profiles are more powerful than you think.

At the moment, your social profiles probably have a few words about what you do and a link to your homepage, right?

But you can do so much more with your profile than that.

Think about it: the more you grow your social following, the more people will start visiting your profile every day. These people are potential subscribers, clients and customers, so you need to strategically lead them where you want them to go.

Without a streamlined profile, you're losing countless potential clients every day.

There are 9 elements to a highly-converting social media profile:

Your name
Username
Short bio
Link
Branding
Profile picture
Background
Privacy settings
Shared photos

Let’s tackle how you can utilize all 9 areas for a super-converting profile!

Your name

Putting your first and last name on your social media profile seems obvious… but you’d be surprised how many people don’t do it.

I hate it when someone tweets me and I can’t say ‘Thanks Cheryl!’ or ‘Thanks Natalie!’ because they didn’t include their name in their profile, they only included their username.

If you’re doing this, stop.

If you want to get clients from social media you need to first build trust with them. Your potential clients won’t trust you if they can’t even find your name on your social profile. It immediately causes them to feel suspicious.

Username

Your username should be your business name, or your personal name if that’s what you do business under.

Don’t choose a weird username like Magsy1967Q when your name is Maggie and your business name is Maggie Designs. It screams ‘unprofessional’.

Bio

Your bio has to tell followers who you are and what you do in five seconds or less.

Your bio should be short, simple and easy to understand. Don’t make up job titles like ‘I’m CEO of Nesha HQ’ and don’t overcomplicate you bio by saying things like ‘I’m a web wizard’ instead of simply saying ‘I’m a website designer’.

Let’s start by creating a bio that’s simple. Then I’ll show you how to make it super focused.

Let’s say you’re a wedding photographer. Your bio could say something like:

Hi, I’m Sarah. I’m a wedding photographer for brides and grooms in London.

You’re telling your followers who you are, what you do and who you work with: couples who live in London.

Now let’s make it laser-focused and give it a bit more personality!

Hi, I’m Sarah! I’m a wedding photographer for vintage-inspired brides and grooms in London. Click through to get my free guide: Choosing The Perfect Wedding Photographer.

This bio is still simple and easy to understand but we’ve given Sarah a clear niche this time. As soon as a vintage-inspired couples read her bio, they’ll immediately feel a connection with her and her brand and they’ll want to check out her website.

Link

Notice I told followers to click through to download a freebie from Sarah’s profile? That’s called a ‘call to action’ and every social media profile should have one.

There’s no point in adding www.yourdomain.com in your bio and sending followers to your homepage. If you do that, you’re leaving your followers to do what they please on your website and you're left hoping they’ll sign up to your list or check out your services.

Don’t leave your followers actions to chance.

Direct them where you want them to go by adding a specific call to action to your social media bio.

Take a look at my Twitter bio as an example.

Instead of linking to my homepage, I've linked to my free 6-day brand discovery course.

Why?

So that potential clients will sign up to my email list to get the free course and will enter my sales funnel. The course will provide them with tons of immense value and occasionally mention my brand design services so they're aware of how they can work with me.

Leading potential clients to my free course instead of my homepage ensures I have a way to stay in touch with them (via my newsletters), and gives me more control. I can keep notifying them of my services and sharing my expertise with them through email.

Here are a few places you can send followers from your profile:

A sign-up page for your latest freebie.
A sign-up page for a free course.
A page of your webinar recordings.
Your services page.
A start here page.
Your latest blog post.
One of your products.

You can link to anything you want, just make sure it’s in line with your ultimate business goal.

Your branding

Your social media profile should be in your brand colors and should include either your brand photography, logo or brand graphics.

If I click on your profile and immediately think ‘This is [your name]'s profile’ without even seeing your name, you’ve done a good job.

Don’t use bad-quality personal photos as your header image and don’t use any ol’ colours for links. When using something like Twitter, always change the colours to your brand colours.

If you need a little help designing a beautifully branded social media profile, why not buy templates from a shop like this one? Or hire a designer to create your social media branding for you.

Profile picture

Remember when I said your potential clients need to build their trust in you before they even consider reaching out about working with you? That applies big time with your profile picture.

Potential clients like to see your face. If you don’t show it, alarm bells go off in their head and they think ‘scam’.

Upload a friendly photo of your face as your profile photo, like Jessica has:

You can use a logo as your profile photo too, but it's less personal. However, this is the best option for larger businesses that are operated by more than one person, like Hubspot:

Your background

Dark backgrounds are usually associated with scams. Obviously not all websites with dark backgrounds are scams, but that’s what most internet users think.

Don’t use a dark background for your social media profile. Not only do most people associate dark backgrounds with scams, but they give a dark and cold impression of your brand. Unless you’re a rock band or a Goth clothing brand, I don’t think that’s the impression you want to go for.

Your privacy settings

Social media sites like Facebook allow you to alter your privacy settings and hide certain things from your followers when they click on your page. If you're an introverted person, I recommend hiding your age, your relationship status and anything else overly personal that your clients don’t need to know.

Your shared photos

Please, please, please don’t share drunken photos or any other inappropriate photo on your business profiles.

Some of you may think this is a silly thing to tell people but I’ve seen business owners do this.

Sure, it works for some businesses because their brand is ballsy, brazen, loud and fun. We expect it from these brands and we find it funny and honest.

But if your brand is not that kind of brand, please steer clear of oversharing your personal photos on your business profile.

We’ve come to the end of the nine elements of a highly-converting social profile, but here's one last tip:

Make sure you’re able to track how many click your social media profile link- it’s the best way of seeing which social media sites are working best for you.

To track bio clicks, I use Bitly.

Sign up for a free account, paste your URL in the bitly bar and it will create a short link for you. Then all you have to do is add that link to your social media bios.

You can then then keep track of how many clicks each link gets from the Bitly dashboard, which looks like this:

Want to learn more about using social media to find clients?

This blog post was a short excerpt from my ebook, Social Splash.

Do you want to get out of a slow stage and start booking clients?

Are you ready to finally get booked out?

In my book, Social Splash, I'll teach you how to find clients on Facebook, Twitter, Periscope and Pinterest- the four places I find my own clients.

Head this way to learn more and buy the book for just $29.

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