Building a Personal Brand With Social Media

When I hear the word “Brand,” I think about companies like Nike or Coca-Cola rather than reflecting on my own professional brand. Though this is a common misconception, we are constantly branding and re-branding ourselves.

Much like choosing an outfit that best fits the situation, your personal brand is how you present yourself, your experience and your personality with the world. For this reason, you need to update and optimize this brand to ensure your long-term success.

Think about how important it is to look impressive on social media. According to Statista, there were over 319M active users on twitter and another 467M members on LinkedIn in 2016.

Presenting yourself on social is an integral feature of crafting your professional brand — and is increasingly significant in getting a new job. You could be the perfect candidate, but if you don’t reflect it across your profiles, you could be missing out on a number of those opportunities.

If you’re serious about improving your personal brand, you’re going to want to follow these steps:

1. Profile Optimization

Ever wonder why it’s easier to remember faces and not names? Turns out that our brains are pre-wired to detect faces first. E. Clea Warburton, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Bristol, attributes this to the fact that we are visual creatures!

By virtue of evolution, your social profile pictures should be the same across platforms — but be sure it’s professional in nature. This will help to create a consistent image on your profiles; therefore, becoming more recognizable.

Finally, your LinkedIn and Twitter profiles have ‘headline’ sections whereby you should be telling the world who you are, what you do, and whom you do it for. This will help to create a sense of what kind of professional you are and what your passions consist of.

Also, you should utilize action words and use hashtags to ensure that people you want viewing your profile can easily find you.

2. Content Strategy

So what are you trying to say to the world? Perhaps you want to share your knowledge and expertise with your followers. You wouldn’t just blurt out your experience in a random way during an interview — you need to craft a strategy on how to communicate your brand with the world.

Much like a company would, the first step consists of a communications strategy. Use an 80/20 mix of curated and original content with a focus on your specialty areas. In other words, you should be selling yourself through your ideas to the people who want to hear it most.

3. Engagement

This might sound like a given, but you actually need to USE your social profiles to engage with people. With so many tools to automate the use of your social like Hootsuite, Buffer, and others it is tempting to just put everything on auto-pilot and let that be it.

Let me be clear, these tools offer you help in building your brand but alone you can’t build any meaningful relationships if you don’t get on and interact with people. If you spend 15 minutes a day in the morning or afternoon engaging with posts, tweets and the like you will see a boost in your social numbers.

I’ll pose an example — in January, I let my tweets and LinkedIn posts go out with no real supervision other than adding them to my queue. The result? In a month, I gained 24.7K tweet impressions, 865 profile visits, and 167 new followers. Sounds good, right?

Comparatively, in February, I’ve used my free time to engage with my followers and targeted audiences. The result of this has led to (in only 14 days) 30K tweet impressions, 849 profile visits, and 300 new followers! From reach to profile visits and even new followers, I’ve successfully doubled my rate of growth by simply interacting and commenting on relevant content.

Whether you’re an established professional or entry-level, a solid personal brand will set you apart from the crowd — this is a no-brainer in an increasingly competitive job market.

Taking the time to craft a compelling social presence will add value to your personal brand and will, in turn, serve as a blueprint for aligning who you are now with whom you want to become.