How to Own Your Personal Brand
If you’re looking to find new work or grow within your current field you must understand the importance of having a personal brand. In today’s society, people are their own media companies. Our social platforms are our distribution channels and the way we communicate or are perceived on them is our brand identity. Your online identity will follow you the rest of your life. Your kids will see your statuses and read your tweets. Your funny YouTube videos or your personal blogs will be cached and archived on the web. Our digital footprint has turned into a time log of our lives and this is a seismic shift from what any other generation has dealt with as some of our parents aren’t even on Facebook yet.
To own and develop your personal brand is the biggest way that you can win in today’s world. Creating content that can get seen across the world has never been easier. If you want to create opportunities for yourself in your field you need to be out there blogging, podcasting, making videos, and using any other technology tool that you can to gain a competitive edge.
If you’re a chef you could start a YouTube cooking show, if you’re a lawyer you could start a podcast about current events that affect your area of law, if you’re a professor you could make Facebook videos explaining concepts in fun and visual ways, and if you’re trying to sell a product or service you should be using search.twitter.com or Reddit communities to interact with people talking about your industry and problems that you can help them solve.
It has never been easier to use these widely available tools to not only provide value to others but to also gain equity for our own brands in the process. Having a website or video that advertises your skills or portfolio is far more appealing than a resume in 2016. Millennials have been quick to jump on the personal brand trend as they grew up in a world where having your own social niche on the web was quite normal. It’s also important to understand how each of these platforms work. Instagram should have high-res images and the use of hashtags to get reach, Facebook content that works best is video uploaded natively, Twitter should have a news element in your tweets, and Snapchat video should feel authentic without production and contain some quirkiness.
Owning your personal brand and creating content around your field of interests is a quick way to not only gain exposure for your abilities and skills, but you also can leverage it into building new opportunities for yourself.
Adi Raval is a digital marketing consultant, entrepreneur, and tech enthusiast in Baltimore, MD
