What is Personal Branding?

Personal Branding is marketing yourself and your career as a brand. It is a  combination of skills, experience, personality, and goals that you want your followers to see.

You can share your experience and develop your brand using various social media platforms. For each social media platform, you have to create a different self-branding strategy.

Why do Personal Branding?

In today’s digital world, personal branding makes you stand out from the crowd. It showcases your skills and the values that you stand for as an individual. It is about changing people’s perception of you and establishing yourself as an expert or a leader.

For business leaders, it is an excellent opportunity to share their vision and goals online as it helps them establish the company’s brand and gain employees’ trust.

5 Steps to Develop Personal Brand

Update your social media accounts

You must decide the social media platform on which you will focus.  Make sure you choose your social media platform as per your target audience. Once the social media platform is decided, you need to make sure your profile is optimized as per the social media platform guidelines. 

Set Content Goals

The first step is to identify your area of expertise. Establish your own branding goals after doing some research. You can also take a look at your competitors or the people that you admire while you’re establishing your goals. Make sure you plan and set the tone of your content strategy considering your target audience. 

Sharing content constantly

In the past, social media engagement used to increase when you shared your content more frequently. However, since the algorithms have changed, sharing 3-4 posts every week is OK. Determine the best time to post on social media as per your analysis. Once you have decided what day and what time to post on social media, you can schedule your content in advance.

Import your Contacts

You will be amazed to learn how many people you already know but have not connected with on social media. You can import your contacts from Outlook, Gmail, and phonebook into your social networks to find out how many contacts you are missing. All the social media platforms have an option to import a certain number of connections.

Join Groups and Forums 

Facebook and Linked In have great opportunities to join groups focusing on specific industries and topics. To identify the groups relevant to your field, use the search feature on each network. After that, you will have a platform to share your insights and build authority for your brand. Remember that your competitors will be present in the industry group. Smaller groups that focus on a specific topic will be a better way to reach your target audience.

Once you have joined a group, be sure to participate in the conversation and add your unique insight to the ongoing thread. Joining social media group can help you gain confidence, expand your skills, and develop leadership skills. You can even create a private group to support your local community or friends.

Few things you should keep in mind while developing your brand

Actively make connections to build your network 

Once you start posting the content, you should also actively start making connections. If you are inviting someone to connect or follow, create a personal message to introduce yourself. If someone follows you on a social media platform, you should do the same for them. You may even choose to follow them on a separate platform to encourage cross-channel interaction.

You can also follow the influencers or experts that have some connection to your business. You can also support them by sharing their content on your social media page as it will help you build your relationship with your fellow competitors.

Analyze your strategy

You should review your strategy for each social media platform every month to see which content is most effective for you. You should change your strategy or add content that has more engagement based on the analytics and make a plan for the upcoming month.

>> Things to keep in mind while tracking Analytics

• Based on your audience analysis, you need to track when to upload content and when there is a higher rate of engagement
• Keep a track of reach, impressions, likes, comments, and shares to see which content is working on your platform.
• Make a spreadsheet to track your audience data which may include new followers, the new accounts you follow, male %, female %, primary age group, and primary location. This will help you in building your content strategy.