Social media is a great place to connect with potential customers, but simply creating a Twitter account or Facebook profile isn’t enough. Only if you give your followers and fans tips, advice, or interesting information that they can’t get anywhere else, it can help you become popular and branded. With this guide especially prepared for you, you can easily build up your personal brand on social media and have detailed information about what you should pay attention to while doing this.
A personal brand affects you as a person, a corporate brand affects your company. When working as a consultant or coach and in direct contact with your clients, building your personal brand is your focus. The trust between you and your potential customers will help you build your business.
Which Social Platform is Right for Your Personal Brand?
The answer to this question is quite simple. Depends on your job! Briefly, the most popular networks and social platforms are:
- Facebook: Versatilely, Facebook is not a preferred network when it comes to personal branding. The network lacks focus compared to LinkedIn, for example. Nor does it offer the ability to engage with key influencers as Twitter allows. Still, it cannot be denied that Facebook is ideal for customer communication.
- Twitter: Twitter allows you to easily follow and interact with experts. This predetermines the network as a personal branding channel.
- LinkedIn: More functional than Facebook and Twitter, but if you want to become a consultant or expert in a field, functionality is what you need. Conversely, LinkedIn isn’t as great for online networking as it relies on real-world connections.
- Instagram: You can create a personal brand on Instagram, but it’s not for everyone. For example, if you are a photographer, Instagram is a very convenient platform.
- Pinterest: This is the social networking choice if you want to make a name for yourself with crafts, DIYs, or similar topics.
How Do You Build Your Personal Brand?
Once you’ve decided on a network or two, set up your account and profile, you can finally get to work. While building a personal brand is not easy and there is no magic formula, these tips will get you in the right direction.
Define your goals
What do you really want to achieve with personal branding? Focus on what matters in your business, like leads or follower count. Make sure you choose a realistic time window.
Develop a social media and content strategy
What do you want to talk about on your channels? It needs a consistent strategy that focuses on the main areas of your expertise. The same goes for your website. Potential customers will come to your website sooner or later, especially if your main goal is more leads. The easiest way to do this is to create quality content that people will be happy to share. That’s why your social media and content strategy should go consistently.
Create a social media plan
Your social media strategy tells you what to do and when to plan. Also, watch out for industry-specific events and situations! You don’t have to plan every social media action, but having a plan will help you stick with your strategy.
Reap the rewards of your hard work
If one of your posts successfully goes viral, are you ready to start processing leads? If not, all your work has been in vain. The least is an email form on the website so you can stay in touch with your potential customers.
Start even if no one is listening to you yet
Because if there is nothing to interact with, no one will interact with you. Potential customers want to know that your content is worthy of attention.
Identify influencers
Influencers play an important role in building your personal brand. This is mainly because influencers have already established the audience they want to target. Create a list of influencers who matter to you and impress them.
Connect with influencers
This is easiest on Twitter because reaching strangers there is not only possible, it’s part of the concept of networking. Whatever platform you choose to connect with, your main focus in social media engagement should be helping people solve problems.
Experiment and refine your strategies
As with everything in business, nothing works perfectly the first time. Keep going back to the basics above. Did you create the right content? Try something new too! Are you targeting the right influencers? If not, find new ones! Find out what works and what doesn’t.
Don’t give up
Building a personal brand with social media takes time. Even if you adjust your strategy now and then, the most important thing is to keep going.
Why You Should Create a Personal Brand on Social Networks?
Remember that after the benefits of personal branding on social networks, the effects of this situation vary from person to person. For example, some people value the connections you can make through the network more, while others value the leads they attract more.
The biggest benefit for your business is having a large number of people on social media every day. So, there is a huge market of potential customers. Social networks for your profession contain the most connections and attract the most attention from customers and colleagues. In other words, you can also do effective networking.
What are the Steps to Create Your Brand?
1. Identify your area of expertise
Creating a unique niche approach gives you more opportunities to demonstrate that you are an expert in a subject or field. Even if your target audience is a little smaller, your conversions will be much more effective. It is recommended to develop your personal brand and focus on a specific market area. That doesn’t mean you can’t have more than one area of expertise.
If you’re passionate about a few topics and they work well for you, you can specialize in multiple areas around the same market niche.
2. Find the best platform for your brand
To build your personal brand on social networks, you must choose and focus on the one that best fits your image/style, your business, and the type of content you will create. Facebook has a heterogeneous user base. About three-quarters of adults use this platform, making it a great tool to promote almost any brand. If your Instagram personal brand relies on images, then Instagram is the best option for personal branding.
It is the best platform for e-commerce brands like clothing companies and retailers. It’s also particularly effective for engaging millennials. Instagram now uses long-form vertical videos on its IGTV platform and YouTube is getting more popular on all kinds of devices, which will push video marketing even further.
LinkedIn is the perfect professional network where you can build a serious personal brand that demonstrates the benefits of your products or services. It also allows you to connect with other professionals and colleagues in your industry or market niche. On the other hand, Pinterest is a great platform to connect with women, especially for personal brands that sell clothing or jewelry.
3. Create quality content with your brand
Creating content for your social networks is essential as a personal marketing strategy in the customer acquisition phase. Building your personal brand with quality content is almost imperative. Once you’ve identified your focus area, it’s time to build your reputation, credibility, and authority. The most effective way to do this is to showcase your expertise.
When people search for information on the Internet, they tend to return to sites that have been useful to them in the past. The same applies to profiles on social networks that provide something useful, depending on the types of content you create: educational, entertaining, or motivating. If you can make your social profile a reliable source of online information by creating quality, evergreen content, over time you will be recognized as an expert in your field.
4. Fill in all the details on your social profiles
It’s important to take enough time to complete your profiles on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. First of all, make sure all your profiles are consistent with each other and with your personal brand.
Completing every detail of your profiles will give you more chances to be found in searches and will feed the algorithms with more information, allowing them to show your profile more to people related to or interested in your area. So always make sure to use keywords related to your business or the service you offer in the profile description.
Also, using hashtags (#) to highlight these keywords makes it easier for algorithms and people to find you. Note that the use of emojis is often recommended because they grab the attention of social network users where you want them to be. Finally, remember that to unify your personal brand on social networks, you must use the same profile picture across all your platforms. Your photo is your logo in personal branding.
5. Opinions and case studies
To gain the trust of followers of your personal brand on the networks, it is recommended to have testimonials about your services or the use of your suitable products. Case studies are also frequently used in situations where it explains the positive result brought to your customers, either in writing or visually. You can request them from past and current customers.
Most people trust a true story (reference) more than speculation and various promises your brand can make. That’s why it’s so important to show your results to your target audience by asking for testimonials or clear case studies.
6. Build connections on social networks
The key to growing your personal brand on social media is to connect with your followers and colleagues. Focused as a social network. That means building relationships with other people in the same field and connecting with influencers with the right connections. In general, contact anyone who can be valuable in helping you increase your personal marketing. Focus on a social connection, don’t ignore your followers.
People you ignore can always be very helpful in the future, but only if you manage to keep the relationship warm. You should also attend professional events (online/offline) to connect with influential people and build connections that form a lasting mutual collaborative relationship.
Joining groups (online communities) also greatly helps you grow your personal brand on social media. Replying to comments on a post that adds to your knowledge is highly respected and builds a good reputation for your brand.
Whether it’s a face-to-face community or an online community, you should socialize and appreciate the presence of its members in your daily life. The more our community trusts us, the more likely people are to recommend your products or services.
7. Analyze how your followers react to the posts you share
For this, you can use an artificial intelligence-supported tool such as Socialays. With the Socialays tool, you can analyze the comments made by your followers under your posts positively or negatively.
8. Your presence in professional networks
Many of your potential clients or employers may want to see your social media profile before any job or hiring. That’s why it’s important to act professionally in networks or at least convey the image you want to be remembered for. If your profiles on the networks are abused in a language or photo that does not respect your personal brand on the networks, you may be forced to create new accounts or delete all your previous posts that could damage your brand’s image. If you want to keep your accounts for personal use, you should be careful to set them private and be selective about who you accept.
9. Be steady and consistent
Because of the great information you upload to the networks daily, it is very convenient to develop your brand message and broadcast it continuously. Insist again and again to respect your brand’s style.
As a rule of thumb: create a consistent personal brand, colors, mission, slogan, and logo because consistency is key. You should try different marketing strategies to attract the best traffic and get conversions. Remember that you can drive free (organic) traffic, and advertise on social networks or search engines to attract customers faster.
10. Establish post frequency in your networks
Your personal brand should have a well-defined broadcast schedule. In addition, the editorial calendar should be based on the optimal publication frequency of each social network. If you are interested in choosing a social network to build your personal brand and see up-to-date statistics, I recommend you read and see the graphs of the social networks most used by your future customers and followers.
11. Ask questions to increase engagement
Questions are a great way to engage your audience and increase the visibility of your personal brand against social media algorithms. The more comments your posts get (an answer to your question), the more visible they will be. So, your posts will be shown higher, longer and to relevant people. And all this without having to pay for ads. Engagement is slow at first, you must be persistent to have a successful personal brand. Also, considering that a response from one follower could lead to a question from another could fuel a great conversation.
Build Your Brand by Taking Social Media and Marketing Course!
Use the potential of your talent and bring it to a strategic vision with the help of personal branding experts.
Building a brand is not an easy task, especially when the product you are working on is your own image. Personal branding tools have become a fundamental need in the creative industry as they help bring talent to a level where strategic thinking and knowledge of markets and channels can make the difference between success and failure.
There are also business models where the personal touch of a product’s manufacturer plays an important role in successful sales. For example, if you sell handmade products, then you can create two social media, one focused on corporate branding and one focused on building personal branding, which might be the solution.
The advantages of having a personal brand on social media can be summarized as follows:
- Confidentiality: One of the goals of good branding is to warm and strengthen the relationship between you and your customers. The main idea behind this is that anyone who has a positive relationship with someone likes to do business with them.
- Reach: The potential reach on social media is huge. When things are going well, your social media presence keeps you talking about influential, high-traffic websites.
- Production: This is your personal brand’s greatest social media benefit. It is also the most difficult to obtain.
None of the benefits mentioned above happen overnight, but with consistent work, you can build a good social media base that will have a positive impact on your business in the long run.
Learn from the experts how to create your own brand! Try Socialays today!
