Personal Brand: Steps to Developing a Distinct and Impactful Identity
Quick Answer
10 steps to building your personal brand aren't just for influencers. A brand is unique, personal, genuine, passionate, and leading with your strengths.
● Key Topics
Your personal brand is here to stay, now more than ever with the leverage of social media marketing! You might think personal brands are only for celebrities or influencers. Wrong. Today, everyone has a distinct brand, easily searchable and definable through a simple web search.
If you position, package, and promote your personal brand using the right channels and content that speaks to the unique problem you solve, you will have more opportunities to attract your ideal client, generate leads, find the right employees, and even find potential investors.
With so many professionals now operating in the online world, it might be more difficult for individuals to distinguish themselves from quirky personal brands in the crowded digital media industry.
Here's the issue, opportunities abound! However, if you don't have social proof to back up your knowledge and skills, your ideal customer could go with the next greatest thing they see online.
10 Ways to Jump Start Your Personal Brand
1. Fully Update Your Social Media Accounts
Decide which social media accounts you'll focus on and remove other platforms you don't use anymore. Then, make sure all of your information is correct and accurate for the networks you'll be utilizing. This will assist you in directing and growing traffic to the networks where you and your work will be featured.
Doing this can get rid of any suspicious content from the past that can be damaging to your professional image.
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2. Identify Your Area of Expertise
Everyone's an expert at something, whether it's creating and distributing outstanding content or knowing all there is to know about your favorite TV show.
Is it time for you to broaden your horizons? Consider the material you've written that has gotten the most attention from your fans. Is it possible to reproduce this with other comparable material or reuse anything to gain interaction again? The more original and entertaining material you publish about your area of expertise, the more your followers will see you as a thought leader in your sector.
3. Make Posting Easy with Social Media Apps
Remembering forgotten passwords, a hectic day job, content development, and maintaining an online presence may take time. However, many social networking applications are available to make life easier.
Sprout, Buffer, and Hootsuite connect to your social media accounts and allow you to cross-post and plan content across several platforms. It is no longer necessary to log in to various personal brand websites. These apps are compatible with the most prominent social networks, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
4. Regularly Share Content
The more you posted in the early days of social media, the more engagement you might generate. Over-posting, on the other hand, causes fatigue and frustration. You want to maintain open channels of contact with your audience. However, you also don't want to appear desperate by oversharing. For most people, blogging 3-4 times a week is the sweet spot.
It's completely acceptable if you don't post on some days. Determine the most important social media metrics to focus on, analyze the data linked with your postings, and develop a successful pattern. If you're having problems finding content to share and want to learn more about what's trending, utilize hashtags on social media or news aggregator sites like Feedly.
5. Import Your Contacts
You might be surprised at how many individuals you already know on your social media networks. On the other hand, there might be dozens, if not hundreds, of people with whom you have yet to connect. To find out how many connections you're missing, import your email contacts from Gmail or Outlook, or contacts from your phonebook, into your social networks. A fixed amount of contacts may be imported for free on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
About the Author
Tiago SantanaManaging Director at Gardenpatch. Tiago has helped businesses generate over $100M in revenue by rethinking how companies attract, convert, and delight customers. He believes the highest-leverage growth strategy is making your customers so successful they can't stop talking about you.
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