1. Stick to your identity
One of the most important steps of building up your personal brand is to uncover your personality and find a unique style. This is going to be the distinctive feature of your image, regardless of the content type you create and the social media platforms you are active on. Keep in mind that finding this style is a gradual process that won’t happen overnight. Also, remember that once you develop your distinctive style, moving away from it is hardly ever a smart idea. Another thing to pay attention to is not to make a mistake of trying to be someone else and sharing values that you don’t relate with. Your brand identity should really reflect your personality. Whether you are funny, revolutionist, or tender, stay true to yourself. Let’s look at Lady Gaga, whose personal brand makes her audience feel accepted, understood, and a part of something important. With all her content and social media activity, she says to the world: “Love yourself, free yourself, be whoever you want to be.”source: Lady Gaga's account
When working on your brand identity, consider these three things:- Every piece of your content should let people know exactly who you are and what you do. Ideally, they should understand immediately how you can help them achieve what they want.
- People often choose to do business with those who are similar to them on an emotional level. That’s why it is important to provide them with the reason why you do what you do and what you stand for.
- Come up with one phrase that will be associated with you and help you touch others’ hearts. For example, you are likely to recognize the phrase “Just do it!” as Nike’s slogan.
2. Focus on the right social network
Every social network has its own audience. And each user has their own expectations for the content they want to see on the platform. If you choose to post the same things in each and every network, you might be wasting a lot of time. Content that went well on Facebook may perform much worse on Instagram. Since every social media is different, we want to cover the five most used platforms separately. So what to post on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn?source: Ivash's account
source: Josef Rakich's account
YouTube
YouTube is another huge search engine. You can find here literally everything: tutorials, DIYs, breakfast ideas, opinion videos, product reviews, room tours, gameplays, recipes, Q&As, and more. If you are wondering what to upload on YouTube as a business, we have a few ideas. Consider creating brand videos showcasing your product/service and your core values, educational & how-to videos, lives with influencers and thought leaders in your niche, video testimonials from your customers, etc. Let’s look at Sadia Badei with her brand called Pick Up Limes. Being a professional dietician with a passion for vegan cooking, she utilizes all benefits of YouTube to build her personal brand and spread the word about veganism. Currently, she has over 3M subscribers on her channel.source: Pick Up Limes channel
source: Neil Patel's account
source: Anh Co Tran's account
3. Optimize your profile information
Make it as easy as possible for your audience to find you and interact with your content on social media. This means choosing a recognizable username, uploading a nice profile picture (ideally, your picture on all of your social media channels should be the same), writing a clear and informative bio, and including a compelling call to action are vital. If we look at Neil Patel’s Facebook account, we will notice that he took the time to properly organize his profile information. Neil uses his real name that is simple, recognizable, and easy to find. Along with all the important contact details, he provided an informative and intriguing bio that makes people want to follow him. On top of that, he uses the same profile picture on all social media as a part of his personal branding strategy making it easy to recognize him.source: Neil Patel’s account
Another great example is Maddie Lymburner with her Instagram project “Madfit.” The fitness trainer filled in all the essential information such as her area of expertise, name, a link to her personal account, and a call to action “Workout with me.” Furthermore, she has an attractive profile picture and a lot of highlights such as “Inspiration,” “Home workout,” “30-day challenge,” etc. This gives Instagram users a clear idea of who she is and what they will get if they follow her.source: Maddie Lymburner's account
4. Create a consistent brand experience
Try to replicate the style across all of your social media channels. Use the same tone while creating your content. Furthermore, pay attention to vocabulary, punctuation, formatting style, fonts, color palette, etc. Keep them as uniform as possible throughout all your social media and different posts. This should help your followers associate this style with you and help build a consistent brand image. When you look at the example below, you can see that the blogger chose three main colors as her brand colors. Those are pink, white, and light green. She uses these colors consistently throughout a website and all her social media platforms. On top of that, she often appears in her videos wearing these colors. Her background images, Instagram highlights, website buttons, logos, eBook covers are all on-brand as well. A profile photo is the same on every social media channel.source: Madeleine Olivia's accounts
5. Publish valuable content
Before you start creating any content, think about why anyone would want to interact with it. If you provide value, people engage easier. Bear in mind that the content you create must be worthy of being acted on. It has to resolve a particular issue, improve your reader’s life or make something better. If it can’t do any of these, no one will care about it. The value you provide could be humor, some insights, or even knowledge about what fruits are the best to buy depending on a season and can easily schedule them using social media scheduling tools to maintain the consistency. It’s all up to your area of expertise and passion. Here are several things to consider:- Do your research. Firstly, you will be able to find out what interests your audience the most. Secondly, you probably know that people trust numbers and facts. If you don’t know where to start, check Udemy and Amazon (books section). These are the places where people go to pay for knowledge. Look at the courses and books’ contents to see what topics you can cover.
- Evoke emotion. Content that evokes emotional reactions is more likely to catch people’s attention. Such emotions include happiness, anger, wonder, anxiety, sadness, and more.
- Share practically useful tips. Content that is useful in a practical way has high chances of being acted on.
- Work on headlines. While your topic itself is super important, your headline can make or break how your content does. Use a specific number in your title (if it makes sense), add brackets, put the most important information first. For example, “25 amazing free SEO tools (updated in 2023).”
- Use visuals but not too many. Images can make your content much more compelling. However, if you feel that photos don’t match your content, you can always consider using infographics, diagrams, or screenshots. Below are examples of practically useful tips and headlines that can make your content go viral.
source: Brian Dean's channel
You might also like: “How to Use Content Marketing to Build Your Personal Brand ”6. Grow your brand awareness
Your personal brand will have little influence if you don’t gather a loyal fanbase around you. To grow faster, you can do the following:-
Invest in ads
-
Find partnership opportunities
-
Promote via email
7. Learn to love data
Six essential personal branding tips are behind. And many people stop here, but there is one vital thing you can’t ignore if you want to grow and succeed – analytics. It’s important to track and monitor social media metrics because they can show how successful your campaign is. Every social network has its own analytics for you to dive into. For example, for Facebook, it’s the Insights tab. On YouTube, you navigate to YouTube Analytics. When it comes to Instagram and Pinterest, you will need to switch to business accounts before you can access your data. Let’s take Instagram statistics as an example to learn how to analyze some basic metrics. You can view insights from your profile in the Instagram app by tapping the “Insights” button. Image 1: Accounts reached These insights display the number of unique Instagram users that have seen your content at least once. Note that reach is different from impressions. The last may include multiple views of your posts, stories, IGTV video by the same accounts. Account activity measures the number of actions that took place on your account (profile visits, website taps, email/ text button taps). Image 2: Content Interactions This section displays the number of your post, story, and IGTV content interactions. Statistics include the number of likes, comments, saves, shares, and stories replies. Image 3: Follower Breakdown On this page, you can see the number of users that followed you minus the number of accounts that unfollowed you. On top of that, here you can find the age distribution of your followers, location, gender, and their most active times (days, hours). These are just basic insights. You can dive deeper and explore statistics for individual posts or stories. For example, you can find out how many people see your content and where they find it (hashtags, homepage, etc.), how many users started following you after seeing your specific post/story, how many shared your post/story, how many tapped the sticker, and so on. Analyze your metrics on a consistent basis and track your progress toward the goals you set previously. The goals may include brand awareness, content distribution, lead generation, and more. So, if your goal was to increase brand awareness, then potential metrics to keep an eye on can be the reach of your social media posts to see how many users you reach each day/week/month; followers count – to find out if your content is relevant for the selected target audience; mentions and shares – to see how many users are talking about your brand or sharing your content with others. Conclusion There is no doubt that social media platforms can and do allow us to build personal brands that result in greater professional opportunities. In this guide, we share with you seven essential steps that will help. Just to sum it all up: Step 1: Stick to your identity. Be who you are; Step 2: Find your platform of influence (in can be more than one platform, but you do need a dominant space); Step 3: Optimize your profile information. People should immediately understand who you are, what you do, and how you can help; Step 4: Replicate your style across all of your social media channels; Step 5: Provide the kind of value that will keep your followers loyal to you; Step 6: Grow brand awareness (paid promotions, cooperations with other influencers, etc.); Step 7: Learn to analyze your data to be able to adjust your personal social media strategy for better results. Good luck!Written by
Ostap
Ostap is a marketing professional (PMM) with 5+ years of experience in the software industry (B2B and B2C). Having worked with email marketing products and services, Ostap has a deep understanding of various email marketing strategies and solutions.