Using your personal brand to maximize opportunities and potential for growth
Lastly, with everything that you need to create, optimize, measure and manage your brand, you should be aware of how to use your brand to expand your network. What’s the point of curating an amazing brand, if no one is going to see it? See below a couple of tips to help grow your network, in addition to utilizing what you’ve learned from our post on making your brand visible and measuring your results.
Tip 1: Ensure your content provides value
With many social media platforms available, it becomes easy to make noise. However, before you do that, you want to ensure that the content you are curating is providing value to your follower base. Make sure you are referring back to your content strategy that we created earlier.
Tip 2: Seek relationships, not just followers
A research study conducted on strategic personal branding for students and young professionals found that personal brands should focus on quality over quantity, and to strive to be known by a network that is valuable to your professional development (Ilies, 2018). So, when it comes to your personal brand, you should be focused on creating relationships, not just a large following.
A simple way to get you started is to engage with your follower base. Ensure you are responding meaningfully to messages, comments, engaging with your followers posts, etc.
Follow this guide to help you engage with your followers quickly and authentically.
Tip 3: Keep up with the trends
Social trends are ever changing, and if you want to continue to build your network, you need to stay on top of them. According to Influencer MarketingHub (n.d.) “staying updated on the latest social media trends can help fuel your strategy and make you stand out in the crowd” (pg 1).
But, how can you stay on top of them? Firstly, ensure that you have set time in your brand management schedule each week to do research on the current social media landscape. Check out this article by HubSpot for some simple tips and tools that you can utilize to help make this easier.
Tip 4: Stay active
This tip may seem a bit obvious, but in order for all your hard work not to go to waste, you need to ensure that you are staying active. According to Barnhart (n.d.) “inactive social feeds are a bad look for brands, plain and simple. Rather than let your Facebook or Instagram gather cobwebs, you need to “show up” day after day with fresh content” (pg 1).
Here are a few tips to help get you started:
- Schedule your posts. See a list of free social scheduling tools here.
- Repurpose content so that you’re not always re-creating the wheel
- Remember that calendar you’re using to manage your time? Block 10-15 minute chunks in your day to engage with your audience and to be active on your channels (Barnhart, n.d.).
Well, there you have it, folks. We hope you enjoyed our 8 blog series on how to build, optimize, analyze and manage a successful personal brand.
References:
Barnhart, B. (n.d.). 15 tips to building a better social media presence. Sprout Social. Retrieved from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/building-social-media-presence/
ILIEȘ, V. I. (2018). STRATEGIC PERSONAL BRANDING FOR STUDENTS AND YOUNG PROFESSIONALS. Cross – Cultural Management Journal, Xx(1), 43-51. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.lib.ryerson.ca/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.ryerson.ca/docview/2299780825?accountid=13631
Influencer Marketing Hub. (n.d.). Social media trends for 2020 and beyond. Retrieved from https://influencermarketinghub.com/social-media-trends/
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