4 Keys to Building a Social Media Strategy for Your Personal Brand

By John Unger

Let’s be honest. The vast majority of articles you will find on the topic of social media and branding focus on small businesses, frequently startups. These articles focus on ways that business owners and CMOs can get more visitors to their websites, induce followers to share their content, and ultimately convert people into customers.

Where do you turn when the thing that you are attempting to develop and promote through social media is your own personal brand?

What Is Your Personal Brand?

You already have a personal brand. Your personal brand is simply how you come off to other people. The question is whether or not you are doing anything to control those perceptions. Your personal branding strategy is the series of actions that you take in order to control those perceptions.

If you don’t think that you are in a situation where personal branding matters, think again. Personal branding isn’t something that only matters to hopeful YouTube celebrities, people who want to be motivational speakers, politicians, or others seeking public renown. If you’ve ever Googled a potential date, boss, or client, what you have done is research their brand. Likewise, if you apply for a job, your potential employers are going to investigate your brand as well. As you know, from looking into the brands of others in order to vet them out, behavior on social media is a huge part of what forms a person’s brand.

In fact, if you have never done so, the best way to begin developing the social media strategy that you will use to manage your personal branding is to find out where you stand right now. You can begin by hitting various search engines and simply looking for yourself. However, before you do that, you should use the "incognito" option. This will prevent any personal settings and plugins from messing up your search results. You may need to add keywords about your line of work, etc. Then, try looking yourself up on your social media pages. What do your friends and followers see? What do people who do not follow you see? What are people saying about you?

Are you happy with what you find? Keep in mind that you shouldn’t only be concerned with negatives and inaccuracies. You should also be concerned about a lack of positive exposure, and any information that runs counter to the persona that you want to put out there. Clean up is certainly part of the process, but not your primary focus.

One final note, if you are a business owner, or you represent a business in any way, your personal brand matters as well. People who are considering forming a relationship with your business are going to check out your personal, social media footprint as well as that of your company.

The Benefits of Personal Branding

At this point, you may still be unclear of why you should care about your brand, beyond dealing with any negatives. Good personal branding helps to establish the framework of your reputation as a person and as a professional. A good personal brand increases your name recognition, increases your reputation, gives you credibility, and establishes you as an expert in your niche.

In addition to this, your personal brand improves perception of your personality, and increases likeability. The result of all of this can be:

• Increase in followers on social media
• More clients
• Leadership opportunities
• The ability to form relationships with influencers in your niche
• Control and ownership over the direction of your personal branding in the future

All of this begins with the development of a personal branding strategy. Here are the steps to take in order to develop the social media side of that strategy:

1. Maintain Consistency Across All Social Media Platforms

No matter where people find you on social media, they should be absolutely confident that they have found the correct person. This means that you should have the same user name, profile picture, themes, imagery, and profile information. When you do this, you not only improve the likelihood that you can be found on social media, you also increase the likelihood that people will remember you and recognize your name and face in the future.

Here are a few things that you can do to promote this helpful sort of redundancy:

Double-check your names and nicknames on your social media accounts. Be sure they are all the same, and consider eliminating nicknames unless you want to use them everywhere. If possible, the name on your profile should be your first and last name. However, if you have a common name, a suffix, middle initial, or subtle variation is okay to use. Just be conservative about it.

Create accounts on all relevant social media platforms—even if you don’t plan on using them. You never know where people might try to find you. This is why it is a good idea to create social media accounts everywhere you can. Even if the only thing you put out there is your profile information and an invitation to visit you on your active social media pages, you will be promoting your brand. This also reduces the risk of people confusing you with anybody with a similar name who is active on a particular platform.

Synchronize your profile pictures. Your profile picture should be a professional looking photograph that depicts you the way that you want others to perceive you. It should also be consistent on every social media platform.

Create a branding statement. This is a short blurb describing yourself to the people who come across your profile. This can be a short bio, a tagline, or a headline. Whatever you come up with, remember that you want readers to immediately understand who you are and what you are about. Think of it as the headline to a blog post that is all about you, and then optimize it by using keywords, action words, and ensuring that it is targeted at the audience you want.

2. Choose the Areas of Expertise That You Will Focus On

The entire purpose of setting up a personal brand is to become known for something. In some cases, you may want to be known for a few things. Try filling in the blanks:

My name is ____________, and I want people to know that I am an expert at ____________. The things that I am passionate about are, ____________________, ___________________, and _____________________. My accomplishments in all of these areas are, ______________, ______________, and _______________________.

Once you know the answer to these questions, you can begin planning the content that you will create and curate on social media. Content is anything that you post on your blog, website, or social media newsfeeds. This includes blog posts, status updates, tweets, videos and gifs, shared posts, retweets, and more. Your content should, for the most part, be relevant to your area of expertise, and the passions and accomplishments you listed above.

3. Stay Active on Channels Where You Predict You Will Have the Most Traffic

If you do not maintain an active presence on the social media platforms that are important to you, you handicap your ability to develop your brand, increase the number of your followers, and build relationships with influential people in your niche. If you are not positing on a regular basis, people will quickly forget about you.

The exact number of posts and tweets you should put out there on a daily basis, depends on too many variables. However, as a general rule, you should post at least a couple of original posts on Facebook each day, along with some shared content. You should also make a commitment to respond to comments, and participate in conversations on other people’s walls. The same thing applies to Twitter and other platforms. You need to be active each and every day.

4. Reach Out to Others

One great way to build your personal brand is to help others with theirs. Follow other people in your niche on social media. Yes, many of these people should be influencers, but you should also build relationships with people that you consider your peers and even people you believe you could mentor.

Then, comment on their posts, share their content, and even reach out to them using private messaging. You will establish valuable contacts, receive reciprocal shares, and create an important role for yourself in the online communities that matter to you.

Conclusion

Your brand is a reflection of the way the rest of the world perceives you. If you want to have control over that on a personal or professional level, you must act proactively to establish your personal brand.