Three Tips to Take Your Personal Brand to the Next Level
You know that saying about the cobbler’s children — they have no shoes. PRs spend so much time promoting their clients sometimes they forget about their personal brands.
Sure, you’re on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Your info is up-to-date. Your resumé is filled with error-free copy. But these days, there’s more to personal branding than that.
We asked Jaunique Sealeyto share a few tips to help you take your personal brand to the next level. Sealey is an independent consultant who works with brands around the world, and is the author of Piece of the Fame: Rockstar Social Media Marketing for Everyone.
Remember: You don’t need to be actively looking for a job to put your best foot forward. Click through for more.
3 Tips to Jump Start Your Personal Brand by Jaunique Sealey
- Develop an Angle. Now that you have the networking basics of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn covered, make your use of these platforms a contribution to your respective industry. Find a perspective or unique angle on the state or direction of your field and act as a go-to information source for those seeking to develop their own expertise. You can accomplish this by providing links to articles, blog posts or reports produced by others, and when ready, your own content. Your goal should be to match the 70-20-10 rule on your various social media properties: 70 percent referrals to third-party content; 20 percent original content; and the final 10 percent personality tidbits and personal observations.
- Generate a Product. Nothing speaks better for a personal brand than a polished item of content that you’ve produced and that can speak for itself. If you’re not ready to take the self-publishing plunge with a full-fledged book, start more simply with a research-based whitepaper or publishing the results of a basic survey that you’ve conducted amongst your industry colleagues. Creating something well-done and neatly and professionally presented will speak volumes to your network and catapult your reputation and visibility in a positive way that lasts well beyond traditional social media efforts.
- Streamline for Consistency. As the ideas in social media evolve and become increasingly complex, people tend to overlook the basics that could hold the keys to their success. The key to branding is consistency. Your brand should represent a reliable quality statement in the mind of your intended audience. Establishing that statement requires numerous engagements with your brand. Don’t overextend yourself with attempts to be on every available platform at the expense of quality and consistency on the platforms that already contain the bulk of your audience. A well-crafted, simple, and informative newsletter can do wonders for a personal brand where certain lower-impact efforts could be easily overlooked.
