61.4% of the public uses social media around the world. And the average person spends 118 minutes on social media each day. This way, it provides a remarkable opportunity for professionals to build their personal brands to get the most out of social media. Today, personal branding on social media is more important than ever due to its wide use, which sets you apart from millions of profiles. Like the branding of a company, a personal brand can help you share your narratives and appeal to a particular audience.
You can show your expertise in your field and market yourself to attract clients. We will walk you through the importance of personal branding on social media and how to effectively create a personal brand.
What is personal branding on social media?
Personal branding on social media is a way of making an online reputation and a distinct image of yourself. You share your personality, values, unique skills, and expertise to add value to your audience. Personal branding has diverse facets of life–your visuals, personality, communication skills, and attitude in certain situations.
Basically, you highlight how you want the world to perceive you. However, your personal branding on social media must match your real-life persona.
5 reasons why personal branding is important on social media
Personal branding on social media is a powerful way to stand out in your industry and fascinate your employees and customers.
1. Differentiate your brand from your industry.
When you share your knowledge and expertise in the field, you emerge as a thought leader and authority in your line of work. It differentiates you from crowded social media profiles and makes you unique.
However, you need to do it consistently; it’s not like you share content after a couple of months— showing up once in a while leads you to a powerful personal brand.
2. Lead generation and sales
As a business owner, creating a personal brand is equivalent to leading generation and sales. You humanize your business through your personal brand. And this is what people crave for–they are more likely to buy from human references. In fact, 77% of shoppers are more likely to purchase from a business to whom the CEO uses social media.
Plus, 82% trust the company more with the CEO on social media. The particular audience witnessed that you are passionate, have expertise in your industry, and what you are as a leader. This turns them into loyal customers and boosts sales.
On the other hand, personal branding also leads you toward exciting opportunities as people see you as an expert in your field.
3. Maximize your Visibility
You can foster your personal brand on social media and reach a diverse range of audiences. Social media platforms like X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn have billions of users worldwide.
When you broaden your horizon on all these platforms and show expertise in your niche, then increase your visibility and reach to your potential employees or customers.
In the meantime, you are easier to find and recognizable, and as a result, also boosts the recognition of your business.
4. Build Connection
From Personal branding, you can network and build a connection with like-minded people and customers. This also helps to get referrals–in personal branding, you provide value and show care, and in return, they benefit your business.
When you build a strong personal brand, you gain exposure at events or conferences where you might be offered a speaking opportunity to share your valuable insights on your expertise niche.
5. Builds trust and credibility
When you show up consistently and share authentic and relevant content, this shapes the trust and credibility of your audience. At the same time, today consumers are more interested in knowing who is the real person behind the brands.
70% of consumers feel more connected with the brand whose CEO has a robust presence on social media. Meanwhile, personal branding is vital for a professional or CEO to shape credibility online.
How to build a strong personal brand on social media?
Building a personal brand requires conscious and consistent planning effort to make a lasting impression. However, it is vital to execute your plans consistently to create a powerful personal brand. Now, let’s move into the steps that you must consider while creating yours.
1. Choose the Right Social Media Platforms
If you are thinking of starting all social media at once, then it’s not a practical approach. You will just burn the midnight oil and stay in the middle of the line that is not moving forward powerfully. So what to do now? The answer lies in your target audience.
Choose the platform that your particular audience uses most of the time. Well, we don’t mean to stick to one platform all the time. But it’s super effective to be picky for effective personal branding. For instance,
- X (formerly known as Twitter) is ideal for making a strong community with your thought leadership.
- LinkedIn is ideal for career-oriented individuals and CEOs to share valuable insights.
- Instagram is perfect for visual content, unlike Twitter and LinkedIn –though you can use visuals on these platforms—Instagram has stronger visually appealing content than text.
- Actually, Facebook is mostly used for creating a connection to middle age.
So, pick up a social media platform that aligns with your audience’s interests. Later, you can try other social media platforms after establishing your strong presence in one. But keep in mind not all platforms provide the same results.
2. Shape a Consistent and Professional Profile
Your consistent and professional profile shows who you are and fosters trust and a memorable persona in front of an audience. Your professional profile must be complete from head to toe–including your name, a high-quality image of you clearly displaying your face and a bio that sums up you as a person in short.
If you are using several social media platforms, then make use of the same profile photo, color scheme, and tone of your content. As a result, this visual consistency makes it easy peasy for people to specify you and follow you on various platforms.
3. Craft Quality Content
Content is everything in building a powerful personal brand. Crafting original content that people engage and love to see is what you must look for.
So, create content that provides value to the reader, resolves their concerns in the field, and sometimes compels them with storytelling to engage better.
You can share your personal life, inspiring posts, and expertise in your niche to capture the audience’s attention.
And it would be best to schedule posting content while crafting content. Some of the prominent tools for scheduling social media posts are Buffer, Hootsuite, Later, and Sprout Social.
One of the advantages of using these is you can optimize the time to schedule a post when your audience is active.
However, you can test it out with analytics tools, like Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, Twitter Analytics, or Instagram Insights, to figure out your follower’s online time and engagement with your content.
Personal branding examples
Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the best examples of personal branding on social media. He shines on most platforms with his energetic and real personality. He perfectly positions himself as a digital marketing pioneer.
The designs Gary Vee uses are bold and straightforward, as is evident in his communication style. Meanwhile, consistency in his visuals and content makes his brand recognizable.
GaryVee resonates with people by sharing his story, values, and journey, including his struggles and triumphs, and inspires his audience to take bold action for success down the road.
Brené Brown
Brené Brown builds an authentic personal brand in no time. Brené’s design aesthetic is professional, reflecting the tone of her content.
She made a clear personal brand statement: “awkward, brave, and kind.” And propel her audience to show up even after failure.
She shows her skills in crafting a compelling story revolving around vulnerability, courage, empathy, and shame. Brené Brown’s personal brand is clear yet approachable, showing her unique values, expertise, and mission.
Pro tip:
- Check out the social media profiles of professionals in your industry who have successfully created personal brands.
- Analyze their profile from design to content to their unique positioning.
- Identify your uniqueness and integrate it into your personal brand to build a name.
Summing up
We give insights on the importance of personal branding on social media. From personal branding, you can position yourself as an expert, build connections, sell your service or product, and build credibility and visibility. However, it is important to pick the right platform and create professional and top-notch content frequently.
In today’s digital world, Skipping personal branding on social media is like leaving so much on your business plate. Hundreds of professionals take the benefits of personal branding and scaling their businesses to the next level. Now it’s your turn to roar in your industry and build a recognizable brand.
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