Personal Branding Using Social Media

 

1.      

The importance of personal branding

A personal Brand help the customer or the prospect to distinguish the individual over the business, It is someone online reputation that has been generated over time through the demonstration of skills, abilities, and knowledge - if I mention just few - in a way that make the individual stand out of the crowd and build a long lasting relationship with the right audience (Business.com Member, 2020).  According to Edelman 2020 research trust took the second position as one of the main farctors in driving purchase decision.

Trust and Brands Source: Smart insight.com

Building a personal brand that people can trust is an ongoing time consuming process. Some of the biggest companies have genuine people, who love their brands, are passionate about them and help to build, advance and share their brands’ values and missions (Stelzner, 2019). GymShartk have Ben Francis, Apple had Steve Jobs and Hubspot have Darmesh Shah and each of these people found their uniqueness that helped them build their reputation and enhanced their companies’ visibility (Stec, 2017).

So, Personal branding is “The practice of marketing people and their careers as brands” (Henderson, 2019)

The 3 components of Brand. Source: Gartner.com/smarterWithGartner

2.      

How to use social media for personal branding

Social Media before and above everything is about relationship building and can highly benefit the SEO processes through link building and improve the webpage authority and it’s ranking (Barysevich, 2017).

Although google stated that social media sharing does not affect directly the SEO ranking, the sharing allow more visibility for the content, increase traffic to the website and engagement (Hall, 2019). Moreover via social Media it is possible to reach the most influential voices in the business sector to propose guest posting and request to be mentioned. Therefore, building a reputable, impactful personal brand is a key to influence people, stakeholders, clients, employees and so on (Stelzner, 2019).

It is important to keep the social profiles active, accurate and current that they carry in the most transparent way the academic and business history and showcase succinctly achievements and future career objectives.

LinkedIn began as a recruitment tool but nowadays it is the most appropriate platform to demonstrate the knowledge and abilities (Stec, 2017).

Facebook, if it was a country, it will be the most populated one, far in front of china. Therefore, it is more likely to find the target audience in there (Stec, 2017).

John Jantsch said “Personal branding is the art of becoming knowable, likeable, and trustable”, Videos, public speaking and podcast are nowadays the most popular ways to present valuable content, build relationships and create connections in the most unique and intimate ways that voice and image can allow (Espencer, K 2017).

3.      

Good examples of using social media for personal branding

With over 19 Million followers on Linked In, 12 Million Followers on Twitter and more than 3 Million likes in Facebook Richard Branson is one of the most popular entrepreneurs in Social Media. He applies the main social media practices that are increasing is influence and likeability.

     He connects with his followers in a human level: He shares content that is showing his concern for the earth and the climate and support healthy life style. Aboulhosn (2019) stated that although there may be an overlap of the targeted audiences, it is still important to tailor the messages to each platform. So, they have the highest impact.

 

     Even though he have a high volume of followers, he is still welcoming customers’ inputs, and answer a number of tweets and comments on a daily basis in a transparent and authentic manner. According to Aboulhosn (2019) Audience craves human interaction with the person they are following. They want to know that there is a real person on the other side of the computer who can answer their questions

 

     He uses social media to naturally build engagement trough storytelling, participate in challenges and encourage positive online behaviour. Making engaging with the brand and the personal brand alike fun is an important component of social engagement, therefore finding ways to motivate the community and reward them for achievement can increase sentiment, retention and loyalty (Bolsinger, 2021)

Rory Vaden is probably not as rich as Richard branson in terms of followers’ number or the number of likes but he also follow the social media usage best practices. He is an author and podcast host. According to him one of the leadership fundamentals is being able to influence people’s thinking (Stelzner, 2019) 

 

     Sharing thoughts with the public may bring opportunity for the individual and the company he represents. People may start listening if they find value in what is shared with them. Besides, valuable content send traffic to the website and convert engagement into leads and leads into transactions (Hutchinson, 2020). According to (Bolsinger, 2021) it is wrong to limit the content to promotional updates only which is a common practice of the outbound marketing practices, The marketing efforts nowadays are build based on trust, engagement  and two-ways communication. 

 

     According Ellering (2015) social media scheduling help sharing a steady flow of content in order to keep a top of mind position. While it is important to spend time into content creation to be able to share with the followers quality and value, it is also important to be able to test which frequency of sharing, what times of the day, which tone and what type of content works the best for your personal brand. It is also necessary to be able to me sure the impact of the social activity and track the engagement.