How to market yourself and create perfect social media persona.
Whether you’re looking to start a new career or grow your freelance base, here are some tips to build your personal brand on social media.
Social media marketing is key to growing any brand. It helps a brand connect with an audience and helps that audience understand what that brand or business stands for and can offer. The same is true for personal branding. Most people want to grow a successful personal brand to help further their career or connections, but even if you’re not intentionally using social media for marketing yourself, your social media accounts will communicate some kind of messaging about you. Here are some ideas for building your personal brand on social media.
Set Your Goals
Even if you’re not actively looking to advance your career or get noticed through social network marketing, it’s a good idea to have a clear idea of how you’d like to present yourself to the world. Social media branding means painting a picture of your values, goals, interests, and accomplishments. What are your goals for sharing this information with the internet? Knowing if you’d like to simply make a good impression for potential future employers, find new connections and opportunities, or set yourself up as an expert in a particular space can you help you refine your efforts.
Be More Than a Status Update
Building your personal brand on social media requires more than just posting about your day. It requires both reflecting your personality and engaging with other users. This means retweeting content, posting responses to people’s content, asking questions, and sharing thought-provoking content from other sources.
Use the Right Platform
It’s important to have a presence on all the major social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and even Pinterest, Tumblr, and Snapchat in a lot of cases. But it’s impossible to do all of that effectively. You should have accounts in these places and maintain them through updates and engagement, but you should focus your best content and more time on channels that you think represent you and your goals.
If you’re looking to advance your career, change companies, or change roles, you might want to focus engagement efforts on LinkedIn. If you are an aspiring journalist or photographer, you might want to utilize Twitter and Instagram more than other platforms. You should find the best creative space for the story you want to tell and then really maximize that space.
Be Consistent
To truly make an impact with your personal branding, you need to make sure that your efforts are consistent. If your personal brand voice – how you share information and the kind of information you share – is wry and witty on Twitter, it might be confusing to followers if they have a very formal style on another platform. A consistent style is key for any brand, personal or otherwise, and helps give a coherent picture of what you’re trying to convey to an audience.
You might need to create separate social spaces for your personal interests and personal branding efforts. The spaces where you talk about politics and share memes with your friends and family might not be the same place you want to share artwork and work samples or network with other professionals.
Building your personal brand on social media can help you connect to new people and new opportunities, but you don’t have to be a professional marketer to create a successful social media marketing strategy to help brand yourself. Start by showing your personality, offering consistency over social platforms, engaging with other users, and focusing on using certain platforms to really shine.
