Social Media is an essential tool for personal branding. This branding tool comes in handy when you want to build your personal identity, image and helps you stand out in your industry. Personal branding is when you take responsibility over how you present yourself and how others perceive you within your niche. Using the right strategies can increase your reputation as a leader. By showcasing unique character traits and having an active presence online, you can work towards building a personal brand that resonates with people all over the world. Remember, people are attracted to human connection and they would like to do business with someone they like and trust.
This article shares some useful tips that will guide you on how to get started on your personal branding journey!
Identify your area of expertise🤓
It is important to know and develop your personal brand in a specific niche. You want to be known as the “go to” person for a certain field. Build up your personal brand by providing useful and tactical advice in your niche to your followers and audience. This way you build a trustworthy relationship.
Another thing is that you could Include your interests and skills in all of your social media profile descriptions. This will serve as keywords that will help your brand appear in relevant search results when people look for such information. Note that it is very possible to have more than one expertise.
Create Your Personal Branding statement
A branding statement is something that briefly and clearly describes your brand. Your brand statement should describe your expertise, the values that you want to accomplish, your vision and mission. An example of a branding statement includes;
“I help thought leaders write great books in just 90 days. 300 satisfied clients so far.”
– Mindy Gibbins-Klein
Here we see Mindy Gibbins-Klein describing her expertise, her value and mission. Your branding statement should help you connect with your target audience.
Be Active and Responsive On Your Social Media Platforms
Ensure you engage with your audience through discussions, questions, responding to DM’s and posting images, videos etc. regularly. Don’t let your social media platforms be cobweb central because of how dormant and silent you are. Engagement boosts familiarity around your networks. Also make sure your interactions are genuine. If keeping track of all the comments and DM’s be a challenge, you can hire someone to help you out.
Another thing you should keep in mind is that you should clean up🧹your account if you haven’t already done so. If your account consists of pictures or videos that are off brand or contains content that isn’t professional, you will have to either delete or create a new account. The last thing you want to do is to portray your brand in a negative light. Most clients may want to check you out on your social media sites before doing any kind of business with you.
Connect With Influencers Within Your Niche📱
This is also an effective route you could take especially if you are just starting out. You could partner with influencers who can help you boost your brand. Influencers are the Kings and Queens of social media. These influencers are individuals with a big fan following. They are active on social media networks on a regular basis, and keep their audiences engaged with their creative content. Collaborating with them will help you with your brand building efforts as they will connect you with their followers through creating creative content around your brand. People tend to trust influencers and their recommendations hence when they talk about your brand you will end up winning their trust in the long run. Influencers also help with brand awareness in the sense that they become your brand’s voice.
Network as much as possible
One way you can do this is by joining niche groups. When you join groups that are relevant to your expertise, you get to learn new skills, grow your network and also gain confidence. Building relationships with like minded people is an essential stepping stone in building your personal brand. You may end up getting fresh clients or people interested in a collaboration.
Monitor and Assess your Personal Branding Strategies
Breaking down your engagement and understanding how customers interact with your online business is valuable information. As your business grows it is very important to monitor your perception to your customers. You need to ensure that your business lives and breathes everyday the message and image you are trying to portray. Branding is something built through consistent marketing over a long time and you don’t want to ruin that overnight. So it is important to monitor content that is going out across your social media platforms and website to ensure these messages align with your core branding strategies. Having routine reviews of your online channels will ensure that your branding stays effective for years to come.
Things you want to review and monitor:
- Images – Imagery is very powerful if used correctly and just spamming people everyday with memes isn’t going to create a professional brand for your business. Check that themes are being used and that these align with your brand.
- Videos – Ensure that you have people representing your brand that you want to. Make sure your content is not being spammed on bad websites which can affect your overall SEO rankings.
- Comments – The voice of a customer is very powerful so monitor your facebook, instrgram and twitter for regular commenters and sharers. These are great people to reach out to and create further content for and are likely to be open to collaborations
- Messaging – Look at the small messages your are accompanying your weekly posts with, these can be the difference between make or break when it comes to engagement. You need to stand out these days but also in the right way.
- Reviews – Monitoring reviews is a great way to gage customer satisfaction and brand interactions. If your brand is represented well you will attract loyal customers who will turn into repeat customers and write great reviews. This starts with how you treat customers when they first come across your business. So remember to treat every person nicely and provide them with the best customer service possible to ensure your brand stands out.
A lot of time, money and effort goes into building an effective personal branding strategy and it is important to ensure your efforts are not going to waste. Using tools like Google Analytics will help you monitor your performance, identify what channels are performing better than others and whether engagement is increasing or decreasing. This information will help you understand what measures and changes need to be taken.
Create and share quality content
This is one way to build your reputation and credibility in your niche by showing off your expertise. Make your website or brand a trusted source of information by creating quality content that is factually accurate and not misleading. It is a great idea to start your own blog and update it regularly but also a good idea to start guest blogging on other blogs. If possible you could also create YouTube tutorials as well. Don’t be afraid to share a bit about yourself as well including your achievements and failures.
