Building your Personal Brand on Social Media: 5 Essential Tips

Building a social media presence online is a daunting task but it does not need to be.

The journey of building my own personal brand was made simple by my Digital Marketing 1 course where we were exposed to a 30-day outline of strategies to grow any type of brand from The Little Black Book of Social Media by Dr. Sharmin Attaran and Dr. Stefanie Boyer. To grow my personal brand, my focus was directed to two platforms, LinkedIn and Instagram. Each one served its own unique purpose. On LinkedIn, my focus centered on growing my professional image. Beyond being desirable to potential recruiters, it was important for me to establish myself as a thought leader in Digital Marketing and eCommerce trends. Comparatively, the primary focus of my Instagram was to share my life experiences as a university student and maintain connections with people from my past. On both channels, I wanted to increase meaningful engagement.

As a student at Bryant University, my experience with social media in a professional fashion was limited. Sure, I knew how to post on Instagram and use the various features on many of the social media platforms, but I started school without ever hearing of LinkedIn. I shuttered at the idea of posting on LinkedIn and was often discouraged by how many connections my fellow classmates had. Now, I have a LinkedIn network with close to 500 connections, an SSI score of 63, and provided me with an avenue for creating meaningful relationships that have been crucial to starting my career. My Instagram has seen a sharp spike in engagement and my comfort with posting content has grown immensely.

1. Leverage your Real-World Connections

The people you have already established a rapport with and know in person are the connections who are most likely to engage with your content anyways. Especially with social platforms LinkedIn and Instagram, when someone in your network engages with you it often leads to their network starting to engage. Let the current LinkedIn algorithm support and work for you. In essence, the platform shows you most of the activities between your connections and ones you do not have which increases your reach exponentially.

On Instagram, when a friend reshares your post on their story, the post then reaches an entirely new network of people who may also be interested in your content. Leverage your real-life connections and encourage them to help you. Support from your close friends and family is the perfect place to start and represents a crucial first step when growing your brand.

2. Cross-Platform Content

Good content can be used on different platforms in various ways. Looking at your content with a multi-channel approach can be massively beneficial in terms of content frequency and efficiency. Utilizing this approach allowed me to double the frequency of my posts without having to drastically alter any content.

For example, as part of the Bryant University Honors Program, I had the ability to travel to Nashville on a networking trip. This presented an opportunity for me to post on LinkedIn and Instagram. For Instagram, I posted about my personal experiences exploring Broadway with my friends from the trip. As the first person to post about the trip, I made sure to tag everyone on the trip and reshare any posts that had me on my story. After, I understood that the best way to drive engagement on my post would be to engage with others so I thought of a witty comment for each post which led to most of those people engaging with my comment section. As I mentioned, this doubled as a professional development trip so I curated a LinkedIn post about the companies, alumni, and campuses we visited as part of our daily itinerary. Events like this offer a tremendous opportunity for multi-channel content and should not be overlooked.

3. The Importance of Scheduling your Content

Scheduling your content has never been easier than now. Websites like Hootsuite allow you to schedule content weeks in advance while including the copy, hashtags, and tagged accounts easily. This takes the stress out of remembering when to post content or what to post.

Your own personal schedule does not need to be as sophisticated or expensive as the solutions being provided by Hootsuite. A simple excel sheet that includes the channel, date, time, content type, and a written copy is all you need to expedite the process.

4. Utilize the Tools Platforms Provide

From optimizing your profile to utilizing new features the platform is promoting, there is no shortage of attributes that social media platforms provide to improve your potential reach. With social media platforms constantly innovating, removing/adding new features, and shifting their algorithm it is difficult to know where to start.

Luckily our course and the book took a step-by-step approach. The best place to start is by optimizing your bio, the place where most people will make immediate judgments about your credibility. Once that is complete, you can begin tailoring your content and optimizing it to the new features

5. Tailor your Content to your Desired Audience

This tip may seem obvious but too often people and brands get stuck with what has worked in the past. This approach will lead to diminishing results in the future. That is why it is so important to find your passion and start posting about it. There are so many tools on LinkedIn to let your audience know the topics and type of content you specialize in.

I transitioned my LinkedIn from a traditional account to a creator account, for free, which opened me up to adding hashtags that described my topics of interest, new users saw a prompt to follow instead of connecting, as well as unlocking new data analytics tools that help to improve my overall performance.

If you found this article helpful and would like to find your own SSI Score look here and connect with me on LinkedIn for more tips!