The importance of personal branding, how to use social media for personal branding and good examples of using social media for personal branding

 

‘Your personal brand is how you promote yourself. It is the unique combination of skills, experience, and personality that you want the world to see you. It is the telling of your story, and how it reflects your conduct, behavior, spoken and unspoken words, and attitudes. You use your personal branding to differentiate yourself from other people. Done well, you can tie your personal branding in with your business in ways no corporate branding can possibly succeed. Professionally, your personal brand is the image that people see of you. It can be a combination of how they look at you in real life, how the media portrays you, and the impression that people gain from the information about you available online.’

(Warner Geyser, 2021)

Photo by Olya Kobruseva.

Report about the importance of personal branding, how to use social media for personal branding and good examples of using social media for personal branding

With the growth of social media, personal branding is extremely important. It isn’t easy to build a personal branding, and a lot of individuals end up failing in this task, because they don’t have a consistent idea on what they want to be known for and achieve.

It is important to be genuine, and to make sure that we are aware of what message we want to pass on to the world. It is easier to fail, then to succeed in this task. Building a personal branding does not depend only on the individual, but also on the way the world will capture the message, and that’s why being genuine is such an important trait to succeed.

Social media has enabled individuals to be able to share their personality and expertise with others. An individual will know when their personal branding is working because they will be a leader for their audience. It is worth remembering that just because one social media platform works for you, it doesn’t mean all the other social media platforms will work. It is important to choose the correct social media platform to promote your voice. It isn’t viable to be in all the leading platforms at once. Being selective is the key!

Once you are succeeding in promoting your personal branding, you will need to boost your credibility and earn recognition and trust. Personal branding will also assist in building new connections and expand your network.

In the past few years, we had great examples of individuals using social media for personal branding. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, is a personality who has been growing massively online. However, he is also a great example on how it isn’t possible to be in all the leading platforms at once. Even thought he has over 93 million followers on Twitter, he doesn’t have an Instagram account. 

Elon Musk uses his twitter account to share basically anything that comes to his mind. He shares his thoughts, concerns, aspirations, etc. A lot of Elon’s tweets cause some contradiction between twitter users, where some users will agree with his tweets, and some users will spread hate towards him. However, this is the backlash that an individual can get when they are ‘famous’ online. But in the end, we can all agree Elon is a leader in his industry.

Reference list: 

Chan, G. (2018) [article] ‘10 Golden Rules Of Personal Branding’ in forbes.com. Available at https://www.forbes.com/sites/goldiechan/2018/11/08/10-golden-rules-personal-branding/?sh=614c623c58a7 [Accessed on the 17^th May 2022]

Chen, J. (2017) [article] ‘The Ultimate Guide to Personal Branding’ in sproutsocial. Available at https://sproutsocial.com/insights/personal-branding/ [Accessed on the 17^th May 2022]

Geyser, W. (2021) [article] ‘What is Personal Branding [Free Personal Brand Health Checker]’ in influencermarketinghub.com. Available at https://influencermarketinghub.com/what-is-personal-branding/ [Accessed on the 6th May 2022]

Smith, K. (2022) [article] ‘Kick-ass personal branding on social media (creative guide)’ in wisestamp.com. Available at https://www.wisestamp.com/blog/personal-branding-social-media/#:~:text=Personal%20branding%20on%20social%20media%20means%20sharing%20your%20expertise%2C%20personality,never%20succeed%20in%20social%20media. [Accessed on the 17^th May 2022]