Personal Branding in Social Media
Personal branding on social media, a winning mix
Professional career Digital talent Labour market
A personal brand is the sum of all those characteristics that define us and differentiate us from others as professionals. Using social media is currently one of the most effective ways to create, consolidate and promote this brand. These tools can be the launching pad for our personal brand and give it a definitive boost.
According to Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, personal branding is what they say about you when you are not in the room. The question is: What do we want them to say about us? Naturally, almost everyone will respond with phrases that define who we are, what we do and how well we do it as professionals, that is words that sell our product or service and ourselves.
What are the benefits of having a strong personal brand? For example, it can help us to be known and differentiate us from other professionals, it can position us in the market, generate trust, prestige and reputation and, as a consequence, help make us a benchmark in our sector. In addition, it can facilitate the task of making new contacts and finding new customers. And for all of this, social media are very important. However, we must take care of our privacy and protect our digital identity.
Social media to boost your personal brand
In our digital world, social media have become an excellent multichannel platform to enhance our personal branding. Given this is the case, do you have to be on all of them? The answer is no. In fact, this is a common mistake that should be avoided because it can be counter-productive. It is enough to be on the ones that are the most suitable for our interests, for example:
LinkedIn
The most important for strengthening our brand in the professional field. It is excellent for positioning yourself on specific topics of interest, finding job opportunities and making professional contacts. It has over 900 million users worldwide.
Instagram
According to the study Global Digital Report Instragam, it now has 2 billion users -23.8 million of them in Spain-. According to experts, this particular platform generates more engagement than Facebook and is ideal for those personal brands that need to showcase creative work.
Facebook
The great generalist platform and the one that can give you the greatest visibility, regardless of the focus of your brand and the rise of Instagram, given that it is the one that has the most users - more than 1.974 billion of active users worldwide and 21,1 million in Spain-.
Twitter
People use it for informational purposes making it highly useful in sectors such as journalism, education or politics, as well as for customer service. In addition, it is an excellent way to associate our brand with certain interests through the proper use of hashtags.
SEE INFOGRAPHIC: Keys to personal branding [PDF]
Managing your personal brand
Once we have chosen the most appropriate platform or media, the second step is to manage our personal brand in an appropriate manner so that it works in our best interest. How do we do that?
Know
Social media allow us to know what is going on in our sector and to act accordingly. Examples of this are beBee hives, LinkedIn groups or Twitter hashtags, since they allow us to access information and people related to our interests.
Share
We can share our own content - better little of high quality than a lot that is mediocre - and also other content with the same criteria regarding quality. Tools like Buffer or Hootsuite are of great help for doing this in an orderly and strategic way.
Communicate
It is important to generate engagement, that is, to interact with the people who are key to developing our brand. How is this done? Through recommendations, comments, debates, etc. However, always remember to... Answer everyone who interacts with us.
Connect
Implementing the good practices in the previous points can position us as specialists in our sector and this is a good time to start establishing contacts with potential clients. And once again, when doing this, quality is more important than quantity.
Monitor
Measuring our actions gives us very valuable information on how to improve, and there are numerous tools allowing us to do this: Google Analytics, if you have a website or blog; the Social Selling Index for LinkedIn, Twitonomy for Twitter or the measuring statistics for Facebook and Instagram.
Examples of personal branding
From all the above it can be seen that the objective is for our personal brand to be related to a series of positive attributes that both the market and society identify us with. Some of the best examples in this sense are found in famous people like politician Barack Obama, singer Lady Gaga or tennis player Rafa Nadal.
The former president of the United States, for example, is one of the most successful personal brands of recent years. So much so that his famous "Yes, we can" became one of the best political and personal campaigns in history, but not only for this successful slogan. His body language, his way of dressing, his gaze fixed on the audience, his precise way of speaking and his speeches full of paradoxes and stories have become a model to follow. Associated with other values, but just as effective. Lady Gaga, like Madonna before her, has built her own brand through taking risks and dressing extravagantly. And in the world of sports, tennis player Rafa Nadal has not only created, but he has also maintained his personal brand thanks to two constants that define him: perseverance and professionalism.
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