Now that you’ve established your personal brand’s messaging, target audience, and core mission, you’re ready to take more actionable steps to promote it. A key starting point is navigating your way through social media. But before you dive into the nuances of social media, it’s important to understand what brand promotion is.
Brand promotion consists of the marketing efforts to bring overall awareness and influence to the products, services, or expertise you provide to your audience. You’ve worked hard to establish the “why,” the “what,” and the “who” for your personal brand—now it’s time to focus on the “how.” Social media, when done the right way, can be a tremendous tool for you to take advantage of to promote your brand.
The Importance of Social Media Branding
Social media can seem daunting and tiresome to most, particularly for those who didn’t grow up with it as a daily normal. So, when starting from square one, let’s first look at why social media branding is important for promotion of both your business and personal brands.
Brand Awareness
First and foremost, it increases brand awareness. Awareness of your brand is a crucial foundation for your relationship with your consumers. This is the starting point for building trust and educating your audience about who you are, what you do, and how you will ease their frustrations.
Visibility
Social media is one of the best ways to increase visibility of your brand nearly instantaneously. With the overwhelmingly widespread use of social media around the world, in many industries, there’s endless opportunities to tap into. You have direct access to individuals and companies to introduce your brand to at the near drop of a hat.
Driving Traffic to Your Website
One of the most beneficial uses of social media for promotion is, of course, diverting traffic back to your website. This should be the prime goal with any marketing efforts a thought leader is doing. Social media makes it easy for both the account holder and your followers.
It’s important to share the link to your website on your social media, whether it’s at the top of your bio or consistently sharing the link on your posts and stories. Doing both would be most beneficial. Your social platforms provide both passive and active ways to drive your followers back to your branded website, building your credibility and further increasing consideration for your brand.
Promoting Time Sensitive Content
As mentioned above, social media is one of the best ways to reach your audience nearly instantaneously. Where this also becomes important is when you have timely content to share.
Examples of these timely pieces of content are an event you’re speaking at, a webinar you’re hosting, a sale occurring, or any other important information that you need your audience to know immediately. Your social platforms are an invaluable resource to use for promoting these announcements.
Setting the Tone
In a previous article Discovering Your Personal Brand, we talked about establishing your personality and tone of voice. Your personal website is a great place to solidify it, then your social media presence can support and expand upon this tone. When your social media matches the tone of your website, this shows cohesiveness and consistency across your brand. This ultimately builds trust amongst those who follow you.
Connection and Engagement
Engage, engage, engage. We hear this all the time in social media, but why is it important? In addition to immediacy in visibility also comes direct access to communicate with your audience.
Engaging with your audience not only builds trust with them, but it also adds authenticity to your brand. Being authentic on social media is not only helpful in gaining followers, it is essential for your personal brand. Consumers want to know the real you in addition to your professional side.
The Guidelines
If there’s nothing else that you take away from this blog post, there are two vital things to remember when it comes to building your brand on social media: authenticity and consistency.
As mentioned before, authenticity is something that audiences crave nowadays, especially on social media. Online consumers are tired of feeling like they are being deceived or constantly sold to. So when they choose to follow someone’s personal brand, they want to connect with the leader that’s behind that brand.
They not only want to know what you do and how you’ll help them, but they also want to know you. This aspect of your social media branding will help to gain followers due to you instilling loyalty in your audience.
Consistency is key to growing any kind of social media presence. It’s normal for things to start off slow. Very rarely does a social media platform take off from the ground running unless the name is already well-known..
However, building up your follower count and reputation on social media takes momentum. Like anything else that has momentum, the moment you stop, you risk deflating the progress you had. You might have to start all over again from ground zero.
You decide what the consistency is that you want to match. Whether it’s posting once a week, three times a week, or even five times a week. Then you can build it into your calendar to maintain that consistency in the long term.
Building Your Social Media Brand
The Setup
We’ve talked about the importance of consistency with your cadence in posting online, but it’s also important to be aware of the value of consistency in the setup of your social media platforms as well.
Your professional profile headshot should be the same for all profile pictures across each platform. Your bios should also be similar or complementary, as these elements leave any guesswork out for the user looking at your profiles. It removes doubt of whose platform they are viewing and lessens risk of them exiting out of your page.
This then leads to your profile name or your “handle.” If you decide to start platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube, this will be something you’ll need to decide. It’s recommended that you always keep your social media handle a) as your name, and b) the same across all platforms if it hasn’t been taken already.
Tools to Help You
As a busy business owner and thought leader, you want to streamline your social media posting and avoid piling on more to-do tasks on your already packed calendar. Don’t worry, there are tools you can use to aid you in your social media management. Here are just a few:
Graphic Design Platforms Such as Canva
Canva is a great tool to use to make branded, professional looking posts for your social media. It can also help if you just feel you need to spruce up your content. With the thousands of templates available, companies like Canva are very user friendly and can help to add beautiful visuals to your platform.
A Social Media Management Platform
There are multiple companies that do this, such as Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social, and more. These tools are wonderful in aiding you to schedule your posts ahead of time across all of your accounts, becoming a huge timesaver.
Use of Generative AI
AI has quickly become an everyday use for many organizations and business owners to help generate and analyze content—and so can you! Particularly when crafting captions for your posts, identifying trends, tracking when other accounts mention you, and so much more.
Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms for Your Brand
The next question to ask yourself is which social media platforms are right for you and your personal brand? When choosing which platforms to be on, you should understand what each one specializes in, and how they align with your goals.
LinkedIn For Thought Leaders
For most of you and any thought leaders, LinkedIn will be your main social media platform, your bread and butter. LinkedIn is a business and employment-focused platform that is excellent for networking and building your professional credibility.
LinkedIn is also extremely user friendly and one of the most flexible platforms for what kinds of content you can post. Everything from short copy to long copy, pictures, videos, and even a newsletter feature.
Facebook for Social Networking
Facebook is one of the oldest platforms on this list. Facebook is an interactive, web-based social networking site that allows you to connect with friends, family, and colleagues, and share information and media.
With Facebook, you can have your own personal account or a business account which opens up other features for content. Having both can be beneficial, but your personal account should mostly connect with family and friends. Like LinkedIn, Facebook is extremely versatile with what kind of content you can create and share.
Instagram for Sharing Media
This platform specializes in sharing photos and video content. Many organizations, business owners, and thought leaders now have Instagram accounts which they use to post more personal and creative content. They can also create short-form video content, called “Reels,” which do very well on Instagram.
Video content can be invaluable for you, particularly if you’re trying to position yourself as a professional speaker. Instagram is another way to get more personal with your followers and engage with them.
YouTube for Video Content
Another veteran on this list, YouTube is a platform that’s meant for long-form video content. Where this becomes useful for thought leaders is, again, when you’re trying to position and promote yourself as a professional speaker.
Any opportunity you have to videotape yourself speaking you should upload to YouTube. For example, at a conference, during a webinar, etc. Once uploaded, you can share the link to your other platforms.
Twitter/X for Networking and Microblogging
Twitter, newly rebranded to X, is a networking and microblogging platform that’s intended for short-form posts, called tweets. Although Twitter/X can be useful for posting multiple times a day and engaging with your audience, it can also be difficult to sift through the noise.
TikTok for Short-Form Videos
Although the newest platform on this list, TikTok has quickly become one of the fastest growing social media platforms across the globe. As of May 2024, TikTok has over 1 billion active users worldwide.
TikTok specializes in making short-form videos (15 sec – 10 min) that can be shared with people who both follow you and potential followers. If you are trying to reach a younger audience, TikTok is one of the best platforms to use.
Common Mistakes Made on Social Media
Over the years, it’s been easier to catch trends of the most common mistakes people make when developing their social media presence. If you’re able to avoid most of these, you should be able to set yourself up for success with your online platforms.
Inconsistent Posting: As we’ve already mentioned, it’s vital to stay consistent on social media, no matter which platform you are using. It takes time to gain your momentum on your page and build your credibility for your audience, so it’s important to keep your posting at a steady cadence.
Treating Each Platform the Same: Although you can certainly cross-promote your content across multiple platforms, it’s important to remember that they all work in different ways. Each platform has different guidelines for how it works. Eventually, these rules and policies will become second nature to you. Until it does, it’s crucial to edit your content when necessary to adapt more smoothly to the platform you’re posting on.
For example: Instagram does not allow you to link urls in captions. If you share a post with a link on LinkedIn or Facebook, you need to edit the caption to remove the dead link before posting it on Instagram.
Not Engaging: We’ve also spoken about the importance of engaging with your audience on social media. Another reason why it’s crucial to like and respond to comments on your posts is because it helps to increase your visibility on the social media feed.
It tells the platform’s algorithm that your content is getting attention and should be pushed forward more. Engaging with your followers and communicating with them also shows them you are listening and acknowledging what they’re saying to you.
Not Optimizing Your Platforms: When creating your accounts and choosing your profile picture, writing your bios, and setting up your platforms, remember to use the opportunity to link your website and even other social media links in your bio. This will aid in connecting all of your assets and adding cohesion to your brand.
Conclusion
When developing your personal brand, navigating social media is an invaluable tool to promote it and spread visibility across the globe. A major part of building your authority is to gain the trust of your audience, and a great way to do this is to meet them where they are through their social media habits. When done right, you can gain a loyal following and drive more business to your brand.