How to Use Social Media to Build Your Personal Brand

You are a brand! Whatever skills you have to use in earning a living are part of what makes your brand unique. Therefore, you need to build your brand. Here is how to use social media to build your personal brand.

Online platforms are outlets you can use to build your brand. They provide a unique opportunity to develop and broadcast your voice, but you have to be careful and considerate.

Social media is a beautiful tool for creating a personal brand. Experienced business owners and entrepreneurs use Google, email, and social media to get press features, clients, and brand partnerships.

Building an engaged social media following takes work, but it’s the key to maximising your opportunities to use your skills in earning a living. These days, with social media, it seems as if everyone wants in on the action. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest are all highly active social media networks. Everybody wants to gain social media recognition for their business.

Building social media brand recognition can seem daunting, but I’ve provided a few actionable steps to you create a consistent brand presence. To make a brand through social media, build and care for your relationships with customers. Thus, communication is vital for online brand building.

Are you wondering how to use social media for small business? Here’s how to use social media to build your brand in three easy steps.

Build your social presence

Based on your life and career goals, start building your social presence. If you’ve not done so already (though I doubt it), create an account (personal profile) for yourself on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and start connecting with your friends and colleagues on these networks.

But being present and accounted for on a social network isn’t the same thing as growing a social media presence. The most common challenge I see business owners and entrepreneurs have with social media is a lack of consistency in their posting schedule and a lack of fresh content to post. Creating a social media editorial calendar not only helps you keep posts consistent and timely but also gives you a chance to develop an overarching and integrated content strategy. Taking the time to create an editorial calendar helps keep your social media presence organised while also maximising your contents’ reach. Several analytics tools are available to help you identify your top-performing content and performance trends. But it is common knowledge that images and video content produce the best ROI.

If you already have a profile on these social networks but feel that your profile is not up to scratch, then work on it. Make sure you fill out your profile bio with detailed information and an appropriate profile picture. Remove any status updates, photos, comments on your timeline, or any piece of content you feel does nothing good for your brand. Ensure each social media network you have involved in serves a purpose. Use hashtags responsibly, and don’t just jump on any hashtags randomly merely because it’s trending.

Create a list of topics you’re passionate about, speak comfortably on, and post or tweet on these topics. Avoid issues that are very volatile (e.g. religion and politics) and get you entangled in online arguments that could damage your brand.

Follow the individuals and brands you love

Whom do you love following on social media? What do they do that makes people engage and share their content? What makes us love some brands, and why are we so loyal to some but not others?

According to this article, brand evangelists want others to use and appreciate the brands they love because they believe the brands will enhance others’ lives.

In an age of facades with social media and technology, people want to believe in brands representing something authentic. Most times, the people and brands you love on social media aren’t just trying to sell you something; they care about your success! They have a story you can relate to, which is why you feel attracted to them. Whether it’s the founder’s or the company’s origin story, we often love brands whose story resonates with us.

Learn to imbibe positive traits from the individuals and brands you love on social media. Try to emulate these brands by working hard to become a brand that other people will love. It is critical that you also establish the value that your brand provides your social media followers. Rather than rationalise why everybody will love your brand, challenge yourself to ask what “value” you are providing those who follow your brand on social media.

Following the examples of the brands you love, build a narrative that reflects your brand and applies to your followers. Create a “reason” for people to want to rally round and follow your brand.

Why does your brand exist? This question sounds simple, but you have to go deep to get at the answer. Once you can discover the core “why?” of your brand, crafting an exciting brand story, authentic messages, and engaging content will come much more straightforward. Here’s where you get into the nitty-gritty of using social media to build your brand.

If you don’t know who you are as a brand, how will you know the people you want to attract as your brand followers or evangelists and online community? To create a bond with your community, learn what endears you into the hearts and minds of your customers. Your brand has an ideal follower or consumer, i.e. someone who feels you made your brand for them.

Your brand story is how you articulate your brand promise, i.e. what you say to your customers about what they should expect for all experiences with your brand.

The entire purpose of social media is to engage and interact with persons and brands that you like. So seek these individuals and brands that you love or share a common interest with and actively follow them and engage in meaningful conversations with them. Then you can attract people in their community to follow your community too, since you all share a common interest in that person or brand you follow.

Remember that the whole point of social networks is to create online social interactions, not to boast about product or service benefits. Social media, at its core, is not a sales tool.

Creating your brand story will help you in developing your content strategy. To make your content strategy, list the content types, formats and channels that would work for your target consumers. These are essential steps that your brand must not overlook. It’s critical to the success of using social media to build your brand.

Display your knowledge

An essential aspect of using social media to build your brand is displaying your knowledge on topics you know on the various social media platforms you use. To do so effectively, you need a social media strategy. It is merely a summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media.

Start by writing at least three goals for social media. Then use the social media analytics tools at your disposal to glean valuable information about your target demographic and how they interact with your brand on social media.

Do a social media audit of each of your social media profiles to take stock of your efforts so far. Look at performance metrics besides the analytics within each of the social media channels. Thus you can see exactly the type of social media posts your audience loves and how you can create more content to build your brand on social media.

To build your brand on social media, you need to learn how to use your social media accounts for professional development and knowledge sharing. Show the people that follow you on various social networks your knowledge by engaging in intelligent conversations and sharing content about things you know. Engagement with your audience is vital to building your brand on social media.

Let the content you post display your passion for your areas of interest. But be cautious so as not to portray yourself as proud or a braggart. Nobody loves a braggart.

Remember that it is difficult to retract whatever you post on social media. Even when you delete it, there’s no guarantee that someone somewhere has not made copies of it and saved it to the cloud. The internet never forgets! So whatever questions you answer or type of content you post on your social networks could one day come back to haunt you. So think twice before you post.

Whether in the classroom or the office, social media is excellent for sharing ideas and fostering knowledge creation. But only if you have a clear idea of what information you should share and with whom should you share it.

Whether as an individual or company, your social media branding, social profile, and social media content are not things to take lightly.

Final Words

Once you adhere to these three points mentioned above, you will be well on your way to building a reliable personal brand on social media. The good thing about the tips above is that we can apply them regardless of the types of social media users, i.e. individuals or businesses. Implementing these tips will help to endear your audience to your products or services.

Having a personal brand will prove priceless in attaining your personal or career goals, especially for entrepreneurs.

Does all these sound daunting? Or maybe you don’t have the time or flare for social media. Or do you need someone to help you create a personalised social media strategy for you?

To achieve social media success, you need personal branding strategies to identify the relevant social platforms you need to create an account. It would help if you also had a content calendar filled with the types of content you should share. It would be best if you also had a solid strategy for your social media campaigns. It will show you when and how to post to your social channels with content with consistency. It will help your content to reach thousands of followers.

Do you need any help? Contact us today. We’ll be glad to help!

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