Social media is a valuable tool for crafting your personal brand, whether you’re established in your career, applying for entry-level roles or launching your own business. It can help you demonstrate your skills and be a platform for online networking.
However, social media comes with plenty of pitfalls. If you don’t have a solid social media strategy, your posts might strike the wrong tone, fail to reach your desired audience or simply take up too much time.
Never fear: we’ve got a comprehensive guide to personal branding on social media. Keep reading to discover which platforms are worth developing, how to create a strategy and the essential rules for social media success.
Which Social Media Platforms Are Best For Building Your Personal Brand?
Trying to be active on every major social media platform is rarely viable. Instead, your social media strategy should include two or three core platforms that best suit your personal branding.
Everyone should have a LinkedIn profile where recruiters, employers and clients view your career history. But some people will prefer to just list their past roles and qualifications, while for others, it’s an opportunity for personal branding and networking. Use LinkedIn if your target audience is industry professionals or you want to establish yourself as a thought leader.
Use the right hashtags, and you’ll quickly find an active community on Twitter. However, with a 280-character limit, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd and gain followers.
YouTube
YouTube is a time-consuming platform, but publishing explainer videos and other educational content allows you to demonstrate subject matter expertise.
Photographers and artists will benefit from Instagram’s visual focus, but don’t write it off if your brand isn’t artistic. There are thriving communities for travel, books, cars, sports and more.
TikTok
With a billion monthly active users, TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms around. Consider it if your personal brand is suited to videos, especially shorter ones.
Facebook groups allow you to build an engaged community of followers, which means they’re a strong option for entrepreneurs.
Niche-Specific Social Media Platforms
For certain industries, you should prioritize niche social media platforms. For example, developers will benefit from a GitHub profile, while Behance is excellent for design and art portfolios.
Your Own Blog
Some people might argue that blogs aren’t social media, but when it comes to personal branding, the two go hand in hand. Blogging is an excellent platform for developing your brand, and then social media posts can help your blog posts reach new audiences. Plus, it’s easier to find blog posts via Google.
How To Do Personal Branding On Social Media In 5 Steps
Social media success comes down to two things: a good strategy and persistence. Here’s how to build your strategy.
Define Your Personal Brand
The better you understand who you are and what value you offer followers and potential employers, the easier it will be to publish authentic, consistent posts.
Identify Your Goals
These could be:
- Showing your passion and expertise on a topic
- Highlighting your social media or video skills
- Demonstrating your personability
- Building followers
- Developing an engaged following that regularly comments
Knowing your goals will help you determine what type of content to post and whether your strategy is successful.
Understand Your Chosen Platforms
Each platform has its own algorithm that prioritizes certain types of content and engagement. Research your chosen platform; discover how to use features such as hashtags, stories and groups; and read about what works well for other users.
Create A Strategy And Schedule
Based on your personal brand, goals and platform features, create your social media strategy. Do this by outlining the types of posts you’ll publish and why, the frequency and how you’ll measure success.
Interact With The Community
Having an engaged community is typically more important than a big follower count. Make sure your posts prompt responses, get involved in the comments and ensure that your community feels seen. This will encourage greater interaction.
Personal Branding On Social Media: The Essential Rules
These guidelines will help your social media strategy stay on track so that your personal branding is successful.
Quality Over Quantity
Make sure that every post has value for your followers and your personal brand. Otherwise, you risk people unfollowing you and the algorithm giving less priority to your posts.
Consistency Counts
Just like in offline life, you’ll build better relationships with your followers when they hear from you regularly. Try to post consistently.
Use Data
Do posts on Fridays get more engagement than posts on Mondays? Which performs better: videos or selfies? How many seconds of a video clip do most users see? Most platforms make this data available to publishers, so use it to fine-tune your strategy.
Be Authentic
Authenticity is key to success on social media. If your personal branding isn’t a reflection of who you really are, or you’re uncomfortable with certain types of content, it will show. Stay true to who you are.
Don’t Hesitate To Delete
Are your older posts still in line with your personal brand? If you wouldn’t want people to see old photos and videos, delete them.
Understand Your Community And Your Audience
Take the time to analyze your target followers and understand what resonates with them. Remember that this may change over time, so pay attention to new trends.
Adapt As Required
Your strategy should be constantly adapting to new trends, your evolving brand and your understanding of what does — and doesn’t — work.
Look After Your Mental Health
Heavy social media use is associated with poor mental health. Your health is always more important than your brand, and besides which, you’ll make far better social media strategy decisions when you’re healthy. So if you notice your mental health is suffering, rethink how you use social media or log off for a while.
A Resume That’s Tailored To Your Personal Brand
Having a well-developed personal brand will help you attract a recruiter’s eye. Whether you discover a job through job boards, online networking or being head-hunted, every interaction you have with the company should place your personal brand front and center. That includes your social media profiles, portfolio and your resume.
When recruiters read your resume, they should have an instant idea of who you are and why you’re the ideal candidate for the job. Make sure your resume highlights your best features while being customized to the role in question. The layout should also be appropriate for your personal brand, as well as professional and machine-readable.
Crafting an excellent resume doesn’t have to be rocket science, however. Our resume builder will walk you through selecting the ideal structure based on your professional experience. It will also suggest recruiter-approved phrasing to help you stand out from the crowd. And, we have a wide range of resume styles for you to choose from.
You can build your resume in just 10 minutes, so get started now.