Personal Branding on Social Media in 5 Steps

So, what is personal branding? Why should you care about it? How will it help you build your career? Let’s find out!

Step 1: Set Your Personal Branding Goals

Everyone has a personal brand – you just may not realise it. Wherever you’ve entered personal data, you’ve created a persona that makes up part of your personal brand.

Add to these personas aggregated data like browsing history, shopping habits, and social media, and that’s your online persona. 

Now, while you can’t do much to change the data companies can gather regarding your online spending habits or the information gleaned from your browsing history, you absolutely can control how you present yourself to the digital world via social media branding.

By taking control of your personal brand, you ensure that people see what you want them to when they Google you.

The right personal branding can help your career by helping you to establish yourself as an expert in your field, a thought leader, or an influencer.

When there’s a promotion on the cards or when you’re actively seeking a new role, employers are likely to Google you, and if you’ve taken control of your personal brand, you’ll dazzle them with your professionalism and your position as an authority in your niche.

Now, the question is: what do you want to be known for?

When it comes to personal branding on social media, you need to ask yourself the following questions: what is your ideal career, and are you hoping to move toward it? These are important questions, as without clear goals, you’ll never achieve branding success, as your posts will be too scattered to be useful or influential.

For example, if your long-term goal is to work as a senior digital marketer at a big brand, it’s important that you join and participate in industry-related conversations and network with other influencers in this space.

Related: Building Personal Brands in the Age of Disruption – Interview with Tanvi Gautam

Step 2: Audit Your Current Personal Branding

Clear all your browsing history or open a private/incognito window, then Google your name.

Why clear browsing data or use a private window, you may ask? Because that ensures the search results are unbiased and that you are seeing the same results as a potential employer or random Joe Bloggs. What position are you at in the search results? Who else is on that page?

Think about how you can stand out from the rest of the entries. Repeat the process with your name and a keyword or key phrase from your goals or the industry you want to stand out in.

Step 3: Get Set for Success

Once you’ve got your goals and you know what competition you have, it’s time to get yourself set up right.

Establish accounts on all platforms that you’re interested in and where your target audience hangs out.

Don’t forget LinkedIn for personal branding and Pinterest, too, as these are often overlooked, but a great source of engagement. Make sure your profiles are consistent and use the same handle, photo, bio, and links.

Do you have a website already? If so, great, you’ve got somewhere else to establish your brand and host your online profile and to contain all your thought-provoking blog posts. If not, it may be worth getting one.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to have to maintain a website, publish thought-leading content on LinkedIn or a site like Medium.

Step 4: What’s Your Personal Branding Strategy?

Having a personal branding strategy in place is crucial – just like you’d create if you were branding a business.

Think about how often you should post. Don’t flood your social feeds with repetitive posts or just too many too often, otherwise, you’ll look like a spammer rather than a thought leader.

A couple of times per day for each social platform is plenty. And you can create a blog post or a long social post once per week or once every two weeks. So you don’t need to go crazy.

You also need to think about the type of content you’re posting. Yes, people want to get to know you, but they don’t want to only ever read about you, your ideas, or what you had for dinner.

To develop your personal brand on social media, you need to figure out a rough ratio of what to post and when. For example:

• 25% new posts about you, your thoughts, what you feel is important
• 25% sharing posts, blogs, websites, and similar that are not yours, but are relevant to your audience
• 40% interacting with other people, engaging in conversations on important, relevant topics
• 10% advertising products you love, your own brand, self-promotional content

A good strategy is to build a detailed social media plan. This ensures you don’t bore your followers and helps to establish you as an influencer.

Related: Providing High Value on Social Media – Interview with Norman Yeo

Remember, businesses need to provide high-value social content, and so do you. When it comes to personal branding, you are your business.

Step 5: Stick With It

Setting up your personal brand and becoming an industry influencer isn’t instant – it takes time to gather lots of followers and to be seen as a thought leader. But stick with it. Stick to your strategy and post regularly.

To make things super easy, you can even use an auto-scheduler that you can load up with posts, and it will post them for you at specified times, so you can plan ahead.

Bonus: Personal Branding Do’s and Don’ts

Personal Branding Do’s

• Set clear goals
• Be consistent when sharing content
• Build an authentic personal brand
• Become an industry expert
• Share industry-related content but also more personal stuff. People want to know who YOU are
• Join LinkedIn groups related to your expertise
• Choose social channels that are relevant to your goals
• Market your personality
• Share visual content: videos, infographics, or images
• Ask your followers for their opinions on specific topics
• Try to be in your followers’ shoes: ask yourself what content they’d like to interact with
• Keep networking

Personal Branding Don’ts

• Don’t focus only on your product
• Don’t focus on the amount of followers you get. Instead, make sure that your posts drive engagement
• Don’t overshare, personal branding is NOT about spamming your networks!
• If you use someone else’s content, don’t forget to mention the source!
• Don’t copy/paste content you find on the Internet. Instead, create your own content
• Don’t forget that your personal brand may change over time
• Don’t expect your followers to share your content if you don’t return the favor.
• Don’t ignore your followers’ comments
• Don’t post rude comments. You don’t have to agree with everyone on everything. But keep in mind that there’s a way to tell that you don’t agree with someone.
• Don’t overthink it!

Conclusion

Let your personality shine through, but do remember that potential employers will see this, so don’t post anything you’re not totally happy with potentially important connections seeing.

When it comes to personal branding, stay positive, be authentic, and lift other people up. Share their content, engage with them, and interact whenever possible. In no time, you’ll have a personal brand to be proud of!