The current technological landscape has made social media and personal branding integral to building a strong professional identity.
A personal brand can help you stand out, build trust with clients, and control your public perception.
Social media can completely transform your personal brand by increasing your visibility and fostering better connections.
So, how to build your personal brand with social media? Let’s break down our 10 steps for the perfect personal social media strategy.
What is Personal Branding?
Personal branding is a strategy that helps entrepreneurs provide a positive public perception. This is done by promoting unique individual characteristics.
The promotion is catered to a target audience. It showcases your values and leverages your skills and expertise.
Social media can help achieve this through targeted posting. You can also increase visibility through social media accounts through collaboration.
How to Build Your Personal Brand With Social Media
There are some easy steps you can employ if you are thinking about how to build your personal brand with social media.
Let’s break down those steps below.
Step 1 : Define Your Personal Brand Goals
The first step is to define your personal brand goals.
You should ask yourself some questions. Such as, what your purpose is, what you care about, and what your values are.
Are you concerned about a specific social issue? Are you trying to appeal to a particular group of people?
What are some socio-political or other current problems that you care about?
These questions will help you to decide what problems and issues you truly care about.
This is done so that you can design your personal brand goals accordingly.
Step 2 : Select Your Niche
You need to figure out something that you can consider yourself an expert in. That will be your niche.
Everyone has something they can leverage as an expertise; that’s your advantage.
Whether you write excellent content or can cook like a 5-star chef.
Everyone has something they are great at. Capitalize on that talent, and that will be your niche.
From there, learn how to build your personal brand with social media by showcasing your expertise, engaging your audience, and sharing consistent content.
You can also look into something you’ve been doing for ages and see if you can innovate it in a fresh, new way.
Step 3 : Research Your Audience
You need to know your target audience, which will be a niche within the target market.
This audience is most likely to engage with and respond to your content.
Research their demographics, subcultures, and the kind of content they like.
Look into content creators, influencers, or entrepreneurs with a similar service or product as you.
What kind of people do they attract?
What kind of age groups are most interested in content like yours?
Look into the age, sex, and geographical distribution of the audience that is most likely going to respond to your content positively.
You can also create buyer personas of imaginary people who will be your ideal target audience.
Have relevant information about these ‘imaginary buyers’ such as their age, sex, and media consumption patterns.
Look into how your product or service can help solve the aforementioned problems.
Use this information to then tailor your content to overlapping target audiences that match a few of your criteria.
Step 4 : Create Your Professional Social Media Profile
Having a polished social media profile is essential if you are exploring how to build your personal brand with social media.
You should have active social media profiles with professionally designed logos.
Additionally, employ a specific theme, and professionally put-together profiles.
Your social media profiles should be active and pump out constant relevant content.
You need to map out the content before posting. Ideally, you should also have a content calendar that reminds you to post regularly. This helps you maintain a proper sequence of posts.
Step 5 : Generate Content Ideas
As we mentioned before, you should map out and outline content before posting. This means you should have a bunch of content ready to go before you start posting.
So, how will you have so much content? You need to generate content ideas. Research your competitors to see what kind of content they are posting to help you brainstorm.
Keyword research and searching trends are also useful ways of generating content ideas. Additionally, you can also get help from AI or use a content idea generator.
Step 6 : Create Content Repurposing Strategy
Content repurposing means using existing content and putting an innovative spin on it. This helps it to connect with a wider audience.
You can use your existing content and reframe it in a way that will help boost its presence.
This is done in a variety of ways. You can do keyword research and add certain keywords to your content to help boost reach.
Additionally, you can turn blog posts into infographics or posters. Posting visual media can often increase reach.
There are also tools online that can help you change your content into video. You can reformat existing blog posts into short videos to upload on TikTok or Instagram.
You can also change webinars into videos. Additionally, you can always gather your existing blog posts about a specific topic and turn that into a booklet or a white paper.
Step 7 : Publish Consistently
Here’s our tip on how to get famous on social media: publish consistently.
If you want to see steady audience growth you will have to continuously keep putting out good content.
Have a posting schedule and adhere to that strictly. Posting consistently will be crucial if you want to be popular online.
The algorithm won’t pick you up if you’re not regular with your posting.
Step 8 : Engage With Your Audience
Creating a social media presence is impossible without building a relationship with your audience.
When you have a loyal audience, they will keep coming back to your content.
It will help boost your social media presence even more. This is why you should constantly engage with your audience.
Ask them for feedback and improve the ones that are not getting constructive feedback.
Step 9 : Collaborate With Other Influencers - Branding For Entrepreneurs
Branding 101 for entrepreneurs is this: you should collaborate with other influencers.
Yes, often influencers who are in your similar niche are also your competitors. However, they are also a huge asset, especially if there is an overlap in audience.
When you collaborate with other influencers, you not only gain access to their audience but also learn strategies on how to build your personal brand with social media.
This is a huge benefit since their audience already seems to like content that is similar to yours!
Hence, chances are, they will also be similarly drawn to your content. This will increase your reach by a lot, especially if the collaborator has a bigger audience.
Step 10 : Monitor and Adapt Your Personal Social Media Strategy
Developing a professional social media profile is all about constant improvement.
Look into your content and how much reach each post is getting.
Critically evaluate the low-performing ones.
This will help you find areas that need improvement within your content.
You should constantly be looking at your statistics.
How much reach are your posts getting? Which posts are getting the worst reach, and how can you improve that content? What is your audience saying about low-performing posts?
You need to keep monitoring your stats, adapting, and learning how to build your personal brand with social media.
Tools for Building Your Personal Brand with Social Media
There are many different tools and software that you should be integrating when building your brand using social media.
Let’s take a look at a few tools across different categories.
| Category | Tools |
|---|---|
| Content Creation | Canva, Unsplash, Buffer, Hemingway, Grammarly |
| Social Media Management | Hootsuite, Buffer, Social Pilot |
| Analytics | Google Analytics, Zoho Analytics, Tableau |
| Engagement | Sprout Social, Social Bee, HubSpot |
Challenges in Personal Branding
There are no pathways you can take that are without challenges.
Being in an online space with a large following is hard. Marketing yourself in a competitive space is incredibly difficult.
Various challenges may come your way. Let’s take a look at a few of these challenges below.
1. Dealing with Online Criticism and Negativity
It’s difficult to put yourself out there for the world to see.
You are bound to get some negativity, hate comments, and criticism.
This is especially true when you are also trying to actively engage with your audience.
It’s incredibly challenging to navigate the public online space.
Although there are positives, there’s bound to be some criticism and negativity.
You need to develop a thick skin in this business!
2. Overcoming Content Burnout
Building a personal social brand means that you will be posting constantly. This means you will also be adhering to a very strict schedule.
When you are constantly churning out content at such a high speed, you are bound to face content burnout.
You will have to find a way to balance your work and your life.
Posting constantly will lead to content burnout.
3. Maintaining Authenticity in a Crowded Space
Sometimes it’s very easy to lose sight of who you are when you are in a highly competitive space.
You will also come across other influencers who market themselves very differently.
While it’s always good to learn from others, you have to make sure you’re not losing sight of who you authentically are.
Sometimes it’s difficult to maintain your true authentic self in a crowded space.
However, that’s what a personal brand is all about: your personal brand is about you!
Therefore, to make it succeed, you will have to be your authentic self.
Even if it means doing things a bit differently than everyone else, staying true to your unique voice and values is the secret to standing out as you explore how to build your personal brand with social media.
How Can a VA Assist in Creating a Professional Social Media Presence?
Personal virtual assistants can be very useful in creating your professional social media presence.
Social media virtual assistants can aid you with several tasks that can help with your personal branding strategy, such as:
- Designing Images: Remote office assistants can create professional-looking designs for your posts.
This will make the theme, aesthetic, and tone of your profiles always look polished and cohesive. - Social Calendar Maintenance: VAs create and maintain your social media calendar so that you always know what to post at what time.
- Content Creation: Social Media Virtual Assistants (SMVAs) help entrepreneurs brainstorm and create content.
- Engagement and Campaigning: SMVAs also help with targeted email campaigning, and audience engagement (such as replying to comments).
Looking for a social media virtual assistant that can resolve how to build your personal brand with social media?
Green Feather Technologies Limited is one of the pioneers of BPO consulting and provides top-notch Virtual Assistant services.
Get in touch with us today and check out our Virtual Assistant Services for more information on how we can help you in creating a professional social media profile.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a strong social media presence is key to building your personal brand.
Start with research and strategic planning to master how to build your personal brand with social media.
Make sure to do proper research and planning before starting your social media presence.
Most importantly, you don’t have to do it alone! You can always partner up with a VA to help you with the more tedious parts of the job.
We wish you the best of luck with your brand!
FAQs
1. How do I choose the right social media platform for my brand?
This will depend on the kind of content you post. For blog posts or long-form written content, something like X or Medium is the best, for short-form content you should go for TikTok or Instagram. YouTube is perfect for videos.
2. How often should I update my social media profiles?
You should update them frequently, but it depends on your content. Instagram and TikToks require more frequent updates than something like YouTube for instance.
3. How can I maintain consistency across multiple social media platforms?
By selecting cohesive visuals, voice, and tone to go with all of your posts.
4. Can I build a personal brand on a budget?
5. How long does it take to build a strong personal brand?
It can take a while, you have to be patient!
6. What type of content should I post for personal branding?
This depends on your niche. There are many forms of content you could be posting.
7. Can collaborations with influencers help my personal brand?
Yes! Collaborators can help get you access to new audiences who are also interested in similar content, thus increasing overall reach.
8. Can personal branding help my career?
Yes, personal branding can help you network, attract the right audience, establish credibility, and attract greater opportunities.
