Social Media B2B

There is a lot of talk about getting your B2B company ready for social media, but once you understand and make the internal changes, make sure you look at your logo to see if it is ready for social media. This is a new challenge that is facing designers and enforcers of brand standards, because while companies are used to having horizontal logos and vertical logos, the new social media standard logo is the square.

Branding and consistency are just as important for B2B company social media profiles, so a logo needs to be optimized for use across multiple platforms to present that image. Many company logos include the name of the company as part of the design. It takes many years and many dollars for a stand-alone graphic icon to represent a company. Remember, early logos for Nike and Apple, two of the most recognizable company symbols, originally had their names as part of the logos.

Here are several approaches to creating a new square social media logo:

Put the Whole Logo in a Square

If you have a horizontal logo, one common approach is to center your logo, both horizontally and vertically within a white square. This keeps your whole logo intact, however, it may become unreadable at small sizes used in many Twitter applications or on mobile phones. To ensure that your logo is as sharp as possible, create the square at 100 pixels by 100 pixels. Hallmark Business did this, and they are easily identified on Twitter.com, but it may be difficult to recognize this logo treatment in Tweetdeck where the logos are one-quarter the size (half the width and half the height).

Pull Out a Graphic Element and Put it in a Square

Another common approach is to isolate a graphic element of your company logo and use that as a square stand-in for the complete logo. For larger companies that have brand standards regarding logo usage, this would require an update of those standards, because generally individual elements of a logo cannot be used separately. One of the reasons this is an acceptable use of a logo is that in every social media case, the profile name, or in this case the company name, accompanies the avatar, or profile logo. Hubspot does this well on Twitter, by pulling out the orange “hub” graphic and letting it stand alone in the square. The benefit of this usage is that the one element does begin to stand for Hubspot and function and a graphic-only logo.

However, when viewing the Hubspot Facebook page, they are using the entire horizontal logo in the graphic area. This causes the small square logo to display a cropped version of the logo. The way around this is to create a square with just the orange hub to represent the logo. Again, this works because every use of this logo (large on the page, small in people’s newsfeeds) is accompanied by the name of the page, Hubspot. The graphic element never stands entirely alone.

Create a New Square Graphic Element

Another approach is to create an entirely new, social media-friendly, square logo based on your existing logo. This approach works when you do not want to put your whole logo in a square because it would not be readable or recognizable at small sizes, and you have no graphic element to pull out. Gartner did this well on Twitter, as they created a square G logo in a blue field. You will notice that it is the same typeface as their logo, so it definitely is connected to their look. The blue is also their logo color. The informal nature of the square makes this work for social media, but it probably is not a substitute logo in other uses.

Again, just like Hubspot, Gartner has not adapted their social media logo to Facebook, or presented their logo in a way that it would show completely in updates, which is the main way people see it. The middle of a word is much less recognizable than the whole word, or even the new square logo, their G. Since every use of this image is accompanied by the page name, Gartner, they should consider using the blue square with the G on all social platforms. The consistency of multiple uses across multiple platforms will contribute to its meaning as Gartner’s logo.

How have you adapted your logo to social media?

Jeffrey L. Cohen is the Managing Editor of SocialMediaB2B.com. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffreylcohen.