Over the coming months we will be giving tips on how SMEs can profit from using social media. Many of these will be in the form of practical advice on how you can achieve an ‘A’ grade on our Social Media Assessment without breaking the bank.

One surprising show-stopper when setting up a Facebook page is the need for a ‘profile picture’ for your page. After filling out some basic info about the type of your business, it’s the first question Facebook will ask when setting up your new page.

Facebook Profile Picture

For most businesses the obvious choice for the profile picture is your company logo. While you may already have a logo if you are an established business, more and more startups are creating a page on Facebook before they even have a web site. It’s a great way to gauge interest before chasing investors or throwing your own entire life savings into the project.

The quick solution of course is to skip the profile pic step. But you’ll have to come back to it eventually if you want a successful Facebook page. You could pay a single designer to take on the project but even with using the best designers there is no guarantee you’ll get a logo to your liking. The overused example being the £400,000 logo for the 2012 Olympics. Now quickly scroll down to get it off your screen.

Lisa Simpson doing something naughty?

Social Media to the rescue. Crowd source the design for your logo. Although we have many qualified designers at Bluecrow, we are also fond of eating our own dogfood so we decided to give it a try.

We submitted our design requirements to 48 Hours Logo with an award of $100 for the winner. What happened next was a complete surprise. We were expecting to get back a few amateurish designs and give the assignment back to our pro designers. Although we did receive a few designs that were laughable, the bulk of the over 40 designs submitted were so overwhelming good that we had trouble choosing the best (of course we again went social and had friends and family vote on the final winner). Some examples of the results below.

Crowd sourced logos for Bluecrow

Even if you don’t like any of above logos, you’d have to admit that for $100 it’s a great starting point for either inspiration or executive discussions. But we bet most of you are impressed with the results and will want to give it a try. Here are some practical tips for making the experience a success.

• Give detailed requirements. In our case, we said “The logo must incorporate a red crow with a blue crown. Nothing cartoony. The logo must also include our company name: BlueCrow and our tagline: Making Media Social.” Being so specific from the start is part of the reason so many of the designs were close to what we were looking for
• Go higher than the minimum reward. The better designers are going to compete for the higher rewards
• Set aside time to give the designers feedback. They have taken the time to create and submit a design so let them know if they are still in the running and what they can do to improve their design
• Once the contest is over, don’t forget to ask for supporting materials from the designer. What font did they use in case you need to change wording? What colors were used and what other design decisions did they make that would help if you need to change something later?
• Consider giving the designers freelance work for future projects. Although a design contest can work for smaller projects like a logo, when it comes time for bigger projects you’ll want to establish a more lasting relationship

If you decide to go this route, please leave a comment below and let us know how it works out. For those of you who have already enjoyed the benefits, please leave any additional tips on what helped make it successful.