In the case of a profile picture, it is better to have one than to not have one.
NEGATIVES
- By not having one, your account has the same silhouette that a deactivated account displays. You could be mistaken for one of them so that when people are cleaning their friends list of dead accounts, yours will be deleted too.
- By not having one, you are telling search engines that you are not a real person, you are a robot.
- By not having one, you will not be taken seriously when you post something important.
- By not having one, there are certain Facebook groups who won't approve your request to join until you put one in the spot.
- By not having one, you are telling a Hacker that you don't know how to put up a profile picture. He'll assume that if your skills are lacking there, that they are lacking everywhere and assume that your account is not very secure.
POSITIVES
- By having one, you are giving your friends and prospective friends something and someone to relate to.
- By having one, you are more likely to have your friend requests accepted right away.
- By having one, you are giving your public a little insight into who you are.
- By having one, a Hacker will not notice you as much as he would if you didn't have a picture in place.
- By having one, you are more likely to be accepted into groups you want to join.
- By having one, you will never be mistaken for a deactivated account so that you're deleted in error. Deactivated accounts have no profile picture because there's no one home on the account.
USING PICTURES OF PETS AND KIDS
Since we use social media to connect with other people, your profile and your profile picture are supposed to tell something about YOU, not your kids, and not your pets. Those precious babies may be your whole world, but they aren't YOU.
When you use a picture of your pets or your kids as your profile picture, it doesn't give any insight about YOU. You can mention you have pets and kids in your bio, notes and photo albums if you want to show them off, but the last place they belong is as a profile picture.
Your profile picture topic should be about something that is your main focus. It is one of the few places on Facebook that can give advance information about you to people who are not yet your friends.
A game profile picture has become acceptable on Facebook because of the amount of friending that goes on for games. It's hard to say what Facebook is more well known for - games, groups, or making friends. While having a game profile picture is advantageous from the games aspect, for the non-gamers that you want to friend, a gamer profile picture will only serve to tell them that you are primarily a gamer and that the games are your main focus.
EXPERIMENT
Put up a game icon as a profile picture and leave it in place for a month. What you are looking for is to see if it attracts the types of friends you are looking for - gamers. At the end of a month, change it to something which is exactly opposite from what you had in place. Note if there is any difference between the two types of friend requests you received.
CHANGING YOUR PROFILE PICTURE AND/OR COVER PICTURE
For some reason, changing your profile picture gets Facebook's attention and if you do it too often, they suspect your account is exhibiting unusual behavior (possibly hacked). This can cause them to suspend some of your privileges or completely lock you out of your Facebook account for 24 hours or more.
Changing your profile picture also causes a Facebook glitch and that glitch is that your settings are totally bare for as long as it takes you to change your profile picture. We've known users who start to do it, then go make dinner, or put their kids to bed and left it wide open for up to 4 hours. When they came back to their computer, they found themselves locked out of their account because it was hacked.
Most hacked Facebook users don't believe it until it happens to them. Experienced hackers will scope out a specific account that sent up a red flag in one way (possibly by sharing pictures or links) and they'll watch for the precise time when the user changes their profile or cover picture. If they never change their profile or cover picture, the hacker is content to sit until the user has shared a few more websites to their timeline. In our experience, twelve is the magic number.
Hackers take advantage of that glitch which can last as long as five minutes. It only takes 60 seconds to hack a Facebook account -- less if he is a pro and more if he is a novice.
Cally and John have been working in account recovery since 2007 and in nearly every case they've helped, on each hacked account either the user has made frequent profile picture changes or the user has been over-sharing links, pictures and websites to their timeline.
The glitch could also happen when you add new videos and pictures to your albums or when you add information to your account like names of relatives (with or without live links) or change your phone number or email address.
Whenever you are doing maintenance on your account, you are making changes. During that maintenance time, Facebook expects the user to review their settings. The problem is that Facebook doesn't prompt the user to do an actual review.
WHAT INFO ACTUALLY CHANGES?
Usually the privacy on the friends list will change from ONLY ME to FRIENDS or from FRIENDS to PUBLIC. But not always.
Sometimes a detail of personal information that is on your account - i.e. phone number, email address, etc - will change from ONLY ME to FRIENDS or PUBLIC. No one will notice that it happened unless they are checking you out for a friend request or someone is just being nosy.
Almost everyone who has ever been hacked has changed their profile or cover picture in the 7 days before they were hacked OR they have an over-abundance of "shares" on their timeline for different websites and Facebook Pages. Hackers know that's when the user's settings have changed and they take advantage of that window of time to hack.
Every time you make a change on your Facebook account, do a mini-security check to see that your privacy on each section has not been changed.
Once a month, write it on your personal calendar to check your settings to make sure they are the way you want them.
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