5 Things you should never do in your Portfolio/Social accounts

❌ No personal information
This is pretty obvious but i still have to include it here. Never put your personal address in one of your online accounts. Also, try not to put your phone number out there too. Email is totally enough. And if someone wants to call you, they can ask for your number later over email (even in this age skype, hangouts and all those providers are more common these days). What i mean is your private information. because of course when you have a business, you have to put an address, mail, and phone number in the disclaimer or policy. But most of them are business address places or business phone numbers or business postcodes. Which you can have as a private person as well. So please keep this in mind. NEVER put your PRIVATE INFORMATION out there. (i dont want anybody coming to your house or attacking you with endless phone calls. People can be creepy...)

❌ I'm looking for a job / I'm available for a new job
Maybe it sounds good to you and not bad at all to have this on your Portfolio side or your Social Media accounts. What does 'Im available' mean? It means that you have no job currently and as a client it makes you think WHY does this person dont have a job? Maybe the skills are not good enough for a job? Or the person cant work well together with a client? Or that something else must be wrong that the person is not fully booked the whole time. (Can you see the problem here?).
Instead of showing potential clients that you have enough time, show them that you are in demand. That you are overall busy, even when it’s not true. When you are booked all the time, then you have something that everybody wants, right? This can be your skills, your connection, or your personality. Doesn’t matter what. But it is always better to show future clients that you have a lot on your table, and that it looks like, that everybody wants to work with you. (dont brag or make a big lie out of it. But it’s never bad to make you more interesting for future clients.)
So avoid the sentence that you are available. Just dont talk about your availability and all is good. If clients are interested in your skills they dont care if you already have a job or not. They will ask anyway. That’s my experience and that’s what i hear from other artists as well. I never had 'im looking for jobs' in my portfolio but still, clients come and offer me job opportunities.
Just for clarification. I dont mean writing a post where you tell that you have more space for work currently because you finished your recent work. That’s totally fine. Im talking about writing 'im available/looking for a job in your title. Here is an example.

❌ No job title
Another thing i often see, especially on LinkedIn, is that people dont have any job titles at all in the accounts. I realize that when i get connection requests, and normally i see people with titles like 3D Animator for xyz, Level Designer, Illustrator, CEO of xyz, etc. But some people just have / or - there. 1st, I’m not willing to accept the request because i only want artists and people around the art area on my list. And 2nd, it is bad for searching for a job of course. When clients search for a candidate they want everything easy and fast because of time. And when you are making it harder for them to know what you are doing then they will quickly jump over you and dont give you any attention.

❌ Things that can make you look like an incompetent person
In this age, the online world is very important to represent yourself as a person or a brand. So be careful what you are doing and what you are posting in your business accounts or accounts you want attention for. Personal interests and activities are not bad in general. It makes a person more unique and interesting. And sometimes being an extreme personality can be an attention magnet. (in a good and bad way). But it has to be in balance. Pictures of you getting drunk all the time, posts with mean jokes, or complaining about everything in your life. Those things can bring a wrong picture about you, even when it’s not how it looks like. Other people can interpret things differently. Dont be an asshole is always good advice. ;)

❌ Language nobody can understand
We all live in a big world in different countries, with different languages, slang, and cultures. That’s a wonderful thing, and we should appreciate the variety of humanity. But the thing is, when it comes to communication, we all have our limits. So talking about finding jobs we have to be smart about that and use something that can benefit our searching. When you google a bit, you will recognize that English is the first and most spoken worldwide language nowadays. (There are also a few others but English is the first one most people learn and use. Here is a link for other top world languages.) When you are using this fact in your Portfolio, you will realize that you will have a better chance of finding a job, when you translate your text into English, so that most people can understand it. You also can add the same portfolio in another language. I know that for example, LinkedIn has this future where you can add different translations to your site, or when you look at company websites they mostly have different translations for them.

The thing why i mention that is, when i get connection requests or when i have to look at portfolios and i dont understand anything there because i dont know the language, i will not continue looking. That means i can’t help this person and couldn’t hire them if i would be a company. So please keep in mind, if you are able to speak English and if you want to work worldwide, then please translate your portfolio into English for a higher chance of getting hired and connected with others. If you only can speak your language (non-English) and you plan only to work in your country, then yes of course you dont need to think about that. But for everyone else who wants to work and connect internationally, translate your portfolio site into English.