How to exercise Social Media to build your personal brand?

Social media is an impressive platform where you can build your personal identity, establish a social reputation, and mark your presence in your industry. Building a personal brand on social media is one of the best ways to become a thought leader in your industry.

Your personal brand is what others tell about you when you leave the room. It’s your professional reputation.

Dorie Clark

Brands often work vigorously to influence social media with the intention to boost online visibility and revenue. They want more clicks, more likes, and they want to create a positive user experience.

But what happens when a brand is a person instead of a company? When it’s just you, you need to take a different approach to growing your brand through social media. Since over 90% of customers trust information from people they know when making a purchase decision, building personal connections might be the most effective way to develop trust and authority with your audience.

Here are nine ways you can use social media to make that happen.

1. Find the Right Groups

Facebook and LinkedIn both offer great opportunities to join groups focused on specific topics or industries. If you can find groups that line up with your area of expertise, then you’ll be able to share that experience and build authority around your personal brand.

Industry groups are good bets, but they might already be overcrowded with your competitors. Instead, think outside the box and find other groups where you’re likely to find your audience.

2. Keep the Image Consistent

Across all of your social profiles, you have to maintain a certain consistency with your brand. When people want to learn more about you, they may search for you on a number of social outlets. Presenting yourself in a consistent manner helps you control their perception of your personal brand. You can damage an otherwise impeccable reputation if one of your profiles shows up with content or images that don’t represent you well.

3. Engage Regularly

Building a brand takes a lot of effort, and it should be treated like a job. Every day, you should be sharing and producing content. Adjust the frequency and types of content based on the audience presence.

We already post a lot on the social accounts for Web Profits, but I still make time to post on each of my personal social profiles.

“A once-weekly Twitter post or monthly Instagram photo are not going to accomplish much, if anything,” writes Michael Noice, founder of Entrepreneur Coach. “For this reason, it’s best to focus on two or three carefully chosen social networks and try to be active on them, rather than posting sporadically to a half-dozen.”

4. Diversify Your Content

I recommend crafting a communications strategy for your personal brand that includes an editorial calendar and a diverse content plan so that you won’t resort to publishing the same types of articles every single day.

Be sure to include images, videos, articles, and even questions. I see a lot more reciprocal engagement when I change up the type of content that I post daily.

Another benefit is that this diversity prevents you from oversharing your own content. Even if your own content is fantastic, your followers will appreciate when you source and share authoritative content from other people.

5. Study Influencers

Connecting with and even collaborating with influencers is a smart way to build your personal brand and get yourself seen, but it takes time. You have to develop a relationship with influencers before they’ll want to work with you.

To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You

Tom Peters