How to Build a Social Media Strategy for Your Personal Brand

Building a personal brand is extremely important when it comes to businesses which rely on a single person.

The way your potential customers perceive you personally will play a significant role in whether or not they decide to work with you or with the next person who seems friendly and knowledgeable enough.

 

As you would expect: An important aspect of personal brand promotion involves the use of social media. Most of your customers are on the two major sites – Facebook and Twitter. So, having a presence on these platforms is a good start. But to build an outstanding personal brand takes more work than that. You need to have a clear system in place: a social media strategy.

We’ve split the process of building up your personal brand on social media in 5 easy steps:

• Find out what your target audience wants
• Lay out a method for connecting with your audience
• Put your plan into action
• Analyze the results and tweak the strategy
• Boost Your Social Media Platforms

Let’s take a closer look at the points above.

1) Discover What Your Audience Wants

Knowing what your audience wants is essential to getting the most out of your social media branding efforts.

Do your customers want an extremely fast service? Do they want someone with a lot of experience? Are they only concerned about price?

Figuring out their priorities will help you focus on that aspect of your personal brand.

 

Studies suggests that positive reviews or good “buzz” is a factor more important than the price, when it comes to a person’s decision to make a purchase or use a service. If you are known as the person who gets things done, your personal brand is going to skyrocket in value.

2) Find The Best Plan To Connect With Your Audience

Once you know what your customers want the most, you need to lay out a plan to engage them. Generally, you should already have a good looking Facebook and Twitter page, but something that a lot of small business professionals are missing is a LinkedIn page.

While Linkedin may seem like it’s only for employees to connect with employers and vice versa, it can actually add a lot of credibility to your personal brand.

One of the best ways to build your personal brand through your social media accounts is to engage with people who talk about you, and especially those who talk to you.

You can decide to advertise through social media platforms if you are comfortable spending money to build your brand. If you know what your audience wants, tailor your ads to hit those pressure points.

A well-designed ad can even help build your personal brand with those who do not click it. The next time they think about whatever kind of product or service you offer, there is a good chance that they will think about you.

3) Put Your Plan Into Action

Putting your plan in action means that you will have to be active in getting people to take a look at your social media accounts. If you are using ads, this should not be much of a problem. Without ads, you need to draw attention a different way, namely by telling people to visit your Facebook and Twitter pages.

With your plan in action, you just need to stay on top of how people are interacting with your pages. For anything positive, just acknowledging the fact that they said something either to you directly, or to your business, is enough to make a person feel like their business is appreciated.

Even a negative remark can be turned into something positive if you can somehow make that person happy. You want to be seen as someone who can fix a problem if one arises, and not just delete any negative comments.

One thing is sure:

If you do not engage with others in social media, you aren’t doing much to help with your personal branding efforts, and may actually be hurting it quite a bit.

4) Review, Adjust And Repeat

Perhaps the most important part of any social media strategy, and especially one that deals specifically with building a personal brand, is to see what works and what isn’t working.

If you are running ads, check your click through rates to see what people are responding to the most. While you will not have to change everything, you will probably find at least some interesting data which can help you better target potential customers, which will help you build your brand with the people who matter the most.

5) Boost Your Social Media Platforms

If your brand uses visual prompts to engage with your audience, then it is a good idea to invest in your Instagram account. Instagram is still the fastest growing social media platform and many people love using it. Posting great content is important to engaging with your users, as is using Instagram to expand your reach. If you want to take your Instagram to the next level then you can hire an Instagram growth service like Social Network Elite. They will help you by engaging with the audience you define by the hashtags you want to target. They will search for users posting with your hashtags and engage with them by liking their photos, commenting, or following their accounts. They offer a free trial as well if you want to try them risk free!

Building a personal brand through social media is going to take some time, you may not see results right away. Things such as mentions on Twitter, Facebook likes, Instagram boosts, and personal engagement on both platforms may not seem like much individually, but they can change the way you are seen by other people, almost always in a positive way.

Keep doing it!

While there is no set in stone strategy that will guarantee you a big boost to your personal brand, the 4-step plan outlined here should give you a great place to start.

Every plan is going to vary slightly depending on your industry, and with how comfortable you or your audience is with social media.

The important thing to remember though is that you cannot afford to do nothing regarding your personal brand. You are only going to help yourself by putting a strategy in place, especially if your competitors are already doing the same thing.