Having a social media marketing strategy for personal branding is essential in helping you spread your message and demonstrate your capabilities and thought leadership.
Personal branding helps differentiate yourself. It is what you represent and gives the world an idea of who you are. Personal branding demonstrates your values, your work style, your experience and your thought leadership in a particular area or range of areas. You have to have a social media marketing strategy for personal branding just like organizations do for corporate branding.
Social media ecompasses a lot of differnt things. It is oftens describes websites where you do a wide range of social actions. Social media marketing is more than just posting on social sites.
It is also blogging, commenting on posts or blogs articles and sharing other people’s content. Social media marketing is also SEO and content development. The goal for SMM is to produce content that is shared with your social network and that they engage or share that content. This increases the exposure of your name and broadens your reach.
Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy for Personal Branding
It takes time to create a vision and it takes continuous ongoing work execute, expand and maintain. Once you begin, the need to be consistent in the messaging and timing.
1. Set Your Personal Branding Goals
What do you want to be known for? Who do you want the world to see you as? You have to describe your “business”, your value proposition. Limit the value proposition to two or three sentences.
Examples include:
- Being a thought leader in your industry or field of expertise
- Becoming a speaker at events or conventions
- Be known as a subject matter expert for topics that organizations are struggling with
A great place to start is to look at what others are doing. These should be people you admire or aspire to be like. Research people who are established in areas unrelated to what you are looking at. Obtaining a wide range of ideas on how others are doing it successfully will accelerate your learning curve.
Don’t worry if what you want to be known for isn’t what you are known for today. Growth and fresh perspectives and knowledge are good things to posses and could differentiate you in the market.
2. Determine the Channels
Content is the main thing when it comes to Social Media Marketing. Where will your content be located and shared?
- Your own blog
- LinkedIn publishing
- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and other social sites need to be evaluated to ensure your desired audience uses those sites
- SEO and SEM
- Syndication sites or tools
It isn’t expensive to get your website address and host your own website and blog. There are free options but you don’t get the same personalization with those as you would your own.
3. Auditing Yourself
Search for yourself on a search engine and on the various social sites you have established yourself on. See who else shows up and how you currently compare. What can you change to further differentiate yourself? How can you stand apart from them? Don’t limit your search to your name. Think about the keywords that are associated with your personal branding strategy goals.
Key points to audit include:
- Profiles – are they consistent? Examine your photos, you bio, any cover photos you may have and links to other places you have published your brand.
- Overall look and feel – this is about fonts and colors and the styling of the text.
- Website – keeping your website aligned with the first two points plus having links to all of your social medial channels
- Social media handles – this can be tricky, if you’re name isn’t common you’ll likely be able to use that but if not use one associated with some of the keywords from your personal branding goals.
4. Establish the Strategy
Now that you have your goals, know your channels and understand your pain points from the audit it is time to build out your personal branding social media strategy.
Search for common phrases that encompass your goals and see what comes up. If you aren’t coming up in those searches build a plan to create relevant posts, updates and other content to start sharing.
A common mistake that most people make when starting out with social media marketing for personal branding is to overly promote themselves. Doing this can seriously damage your efforts and cause you to lose valuable followers that you have gained. The reason for this is because people don’t want to be bombarded with your pitch anymore than they like to see the same commercial during their favorite hour long TV show.
Spend time finding relevant articles from other social media influencers that complement your brand. When you want to be known a particular topic and start sharing news about that topic the more people will begin to associate yourself with those topics.
Once your audience has reached a certain size it is time to start thinking about managing your online presence more effectively. This is when social media tools can be valuable. Social media tools will allow you to view all your activity and mentions or messages across multiple networks. These tools will help you nurture your followers and saves time so that you can spend more time creating and curating content.
5. Measure and Improve
Spend time reviewing the social media analytics that are available to you. Most social sites provide analytics and if you’ve picked an automation tool the analytics will be more robust. If you built your own website you should have Google Analytics installed so that you can see what content is getting the most views along with how many site visitors and where they are coming from. If you aren’t seeing the results you were expecting start making small changes to the what and how of your social media marketing strategy.
Patience is required here especially if you are starting fresh. It takes time to build up an audience. You also have to make sure you are interacting with your followers by commenting or liking their posts. Sharing their posts and mentioning them will get you a bigger boost.
Having a successful social media marketing strategy for personal branding is a smart thing to do. Being successful boiling your brand down to something truly interesting and provides value without overselling yourself. Social media is basically word of mouth, give people something worth opening the mouth about.
Social media marketing humanizes you in much more broader ways than have traditionally been available. Make sure your strategy allows your personal presence, personality and thought leadership shine through all the elements of your social media marketing for personal branding strategy.
