How to use social media for personal branding

 

The importance of personal branding

A personal brand is a unique combination between your skills and experience, which expresses exactly who you are. In simpler words, it is how you present yourself to the world. (Caroline Castrillon, 2019)

According to PersonalBrand.com (n.d.), a personal brand is the objective, and the personal branding is the process to achieve this objective.

There are certain actions that must be taken in order to fulfil the process:  find your uniqueness, build a reputation on the things you want to be known for, and then allow yourself to be known for them. All these actions have a single goal, and this would be to create something that conveys a message and can be monetized. (Michael Stelzner, 2019)

How to use social media for personal branding  

When it comes to build a personal brand, fist thing to be done is to define the message you want to communicate. Then, you should define the media and modalities to deliver your personal brand. (Michael Stelzner, 2019)

There are many modalities to develop a strong personal brand on social media.

Keeping the image consistent is one of them. It is important to maintain a certain consistency across all your social profiles. This will help you to control audiences’ perception of your personal brand.

If you wish your personal brand to be successful, search for relevant articles or topics and engage with the community established already around your field. People will get to associate you with a certain topic once you start to post regularly about it. (Jenn Chen, 2017)

Another method is diversifying your content by including images, videos, articles and even questions. This will prevent you from sharing the same type of content, which might annoy your audience. (Sujan Patel, 2016) If you have a blog, it would also be a good idea to post links back to it, demonstrating your expertise in a certain industry. Asking question is a great way to improve your personal brand and increase the engagement on your posts.

Good examples of using social media for personal branding.

Lewis Howes managed to develop an outstanding personal brand after he quit football. He started a new career from scratch, becoming a bestseller author and running his own podcast. 

Neil Patel, a well-known digital marketing expert, built his great personal brand in time. He was co-founder for many companies, but since 2014 when he created his personal blog, his personal brand took off. In his blog posts, he gets more than 200 comments, and he replies to almost all of them. (Neil Patel, 2018)

Reference list

1.      Caroline Castrillon (2019) Why Personal Branding Is More Important Than Ever [online]. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2019/02/12/why-personal-branding-is-more-important-than-ever/?sh=76f5d6732408b[Accessed 20 April 2021)

2.      PersonalBrand.com (n.d.), Definition of a Personal Brand vs. Personal Branding [online]. Available at: https://personalbrand.com/definition/ [Accessed 20 April 2021];

3.      Michael Stelzner (2019), Personal Branding: How to Successfully Build Your Brand [online]. Available at: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/personal-branding-how-to-successfully-build-brand-rory-vaden/ [Accessed 21 April 2021];

4.      Jenn Chen (2017), The Ultimate Guide to Personal Branding [online]. Available at:

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/personal-branding/ [Accessed 21 April 2021];

5.      Sujan Patel (2016), 9 Ways to Use Social Media to Build Your Personal Brand [online]. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sujanpatel/2016/11/12/9-ways-to-use-social-media-to-build-your-personal-brand/?sh=424b98c03520 [Accessed 21 April 2021]

6.      (Neil Patel, 2018), I Wish I Never Built a Personal Brand [online]. Available at:  https://neilpatel.com/blog/build-personal-brand/ [Accessed 21 April 2021]