Digital marketing blog

Let´s find out what is a personal branding, why is it important to build your online personal branding, how social media can help you with it and see some good examples of using social media to develop personal branding.

Personal branding is a concept different from corporate branding. If in a corporate branding we promote the business and its product, in personal branding you promote yourself.

“Personal branding is the strategy of establishing and promoting you, which includes your industry expertise, skills, experience, the kind of person you are and what you stand for.”

(Wendi Marx, Business to community, February 2020).

Why is it important to build personal branding?

We live in an era where technology makes a great impact on people´s lives, so our online footprint is key to our professional success. According to the Manifest 2020, 98% of employers “do background research about candidates online”, and 90% of employers “factor a job candidate’s social media accounts into their hiring decisions”. And if you’re a business owner, you should know that people claim they trust persons more than companies and organizations. Thus, by building personal branding, you can tell your story, build trust and reputation in your field, emphasize your strengths and passion, find new clients.

As you probably know already, Google gives higher visibility to the main social media platforms. So, social media can be used effectively to create and nourish your personal brand and here are some tips on how to use social media for personal branding:

Identify your “target person”

Picture those people who will be interested in the information you will publish. What do they do, which social media do they use, and what message do you want to transmit about yourself.

Review, update and unify your social media profiles information.

Be sure to update and fill the headlines and to use the same name and “about” information, as well as the same design and colours. This will help you to stand out of the crowd and will help your followers to find you easily. 

Provide links back to your blog in all your social media accounts.

This will help you to promote your blog content and to build your reputation of an expert. If you have WordPress, you can use a plugin to automatically send your new posts to your social media pages. However, be sure to customize your post content to each platform. Use different caption length, image formatting, and vocabulary which corresponds each platform.

Use images and infographics in your posts 

Interesting and high-quality visual content increases users engagement and improves content reach, in addition, people are likely to share it with their networks. According to Buzzsumo Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than posts without images:

And tweets with images get 150% more retweeted that those without images:

Release short videos and run your podcasts 

It´s not a secret that the consumption for video and audio content is actively growing. Make your video short and get straight to the point. This will keep the attention of your audience without getting them bored and people are more likely to share short videos. According to Wistia, videos under two minutes long get the most engagement:

Ask your audience for their insights 

This is not only a good way to increase users engagement, but also will give you some ideas on your next content topics.

Join chats and thematic groups and communities

Comment and participate in discussions, publish your content. All these actions will help you to promote the content you share and to build your personal branding.

The good examples of social media usage for personal branding is Neil Patel, co-founder of Neil Patel Digital and digital marketing expert. Neil makes highly curated, diversified and interesting content for each social media platform and I also like how Neil uses the same style and design in all social media accounts:

Another good example you may like is Ann Handley, Chief content officer in Marketing profs and cited in Forbes as the most influential woman in social media.

All in all, social media are meant to connect people with people and this is why building personal branding in social media is way easier than building corporate branding. So to successfully build corporate branding in social media, we need to think of brands as personas, we need to humanize them in order to get the most of their social media profiles.

Reference list:

business2community.com

themanifest.com

blog.hubspot.com

buzzsumo.com

buffer.com

socialmediaexaminer.com

influencermarketinghub.com

digitalmarketinginstitute.com

business2community.com