5 Advanced Tips on How to Brand Yourself on Social Media in 2023
Last update: 3 August 2023 at 12:31 pm
3.00/5Understanding how to brand yourself on social media platforms helps you differentiate yourself from your competitors offering similar services, helps build trust with potential clients, and ultimately lands you more (and more lucrative) work.
It’s 2023, and you’re likely aware of the importance of building a personal brand on social media, whether you’re an agency owner, a freelancer, or an employee with a side hustle.
You may also be aware of some fundamental advice on how to brand yourself on social media, which includes:
- Pick the right platforms: typically, for business purposes, these tend to be LinkedIn and Twitter. Still, if you’re operating in the visual marketing industry, it likely extends to visually oriented platforms like Instagram or niche-specific communities like Behance.
- Post consistently: building a personal brand is mainly about constantly posting quality content around your core services, such as actionable tactics, short videos, case studies, and even thought-provoking questions backed by your first-hand experiences and knowledge.
- Follow other experts: to establish yourself as a trusted expert, it’s a good idea to stay in the company of already-established experts, keep an eye on how they engage with others, engage with their content, and emulate it by adding your personal touch.
But there’s more to it. In this post, look at five advanced tips on building a powerful personal brand that drives more inbound business.
Treat your profile and bio as a branded one
While this may seem basic, many make the mistake of diving straight into content creation before optimizing their social media profiles. If you wish to establish yourself as a brand — an individual with a unique personality and promise — your profile should reflect that.
Here’s a great example of a “branded” LinkedIn profile from Pedro Cortés, a SaaS consultant.
Note the on-brand background in the profile picture, the result-oriented cover image (with real numbers and a call-to-action), and the value-based headline “I help SaaS companies turn more visitors into customers through better messaging and positioning.”
When a prospect or a peer lands on this profile, they immediately get a strong sense of his authority, industry expertise, and commitment to adding value for his clients. That helps him stand out as a brand instead of appearing as just another individual.
Let’s consider another example on Twitter. Check out this personal-branded profile — with a well-optimized bio and profile picture (which almost looks like a personal brand logo) — from Lizzie Davey.
Note especially the way she highlights her profile photo with a cyan circle and colored shadows — if you stumble across her tweet in your timeline, you’d likely be interested in clicking through to her profile to learn more about her.
For this, consider using an app like Facetune that lets you create standout selfies to express your unique style. It is a powerful app for all profile photo edits, from makeup adjustment and lighting fixes to background removal and replacements, all easily accessed as “instant edits.”
Furthermore, Facetune’s AI Avatars feature lets you create an artistic model based on your photos. You can input simple text prompts that turn into AI-generated images in different scenes.
Share your failures and learnings
Consider any authoritative personal brand on social media: what’s the one thing they have in common? They’re authentic.
Not just about their wins but also their failures. They share their takeaways from every significant positive or negative experience in their work and personal life. Sharing your flops might make you look amateurish, but you become more relatable and accomplished when you add actionable tips and unique insights.
For example, Sandeep Kochhar, founder of BlewMinds (a coaching and consulting agency), gained his reputation as a LinkedIn Top Voice mainly owing to his personal stories (such as the one below) on failures.
In short, authenticity builds authority. If you’re serious about building a notable personal brand, don’t be afraid to get a bit unique in sharing stories about your successes and failures.
Find the right industry groups and initiate discussions regularly
Social media groups help you get in front of the right people who share common interests and work profiles.
You can find and join groups relevant to your buyer personas’ interests on multiple platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (follow the links to begin your hunt). Once you’re in, dedicate some time each week to engage with group members — add helpful comments on their social media posts, share relevant resources, show support for their content, etc.
Create niche-specific polls and surveys as they’re easy to respond to and thus tend to generate more engagement.
This way, you’re engaging with and building your value in front of relevant people in your industry, which can indirectly land you more work (via referrals).
In particular, for Facebook, consider using a group monitoring tool like GroupsTracker.com. It lets you follow Facebook groups (both public and private) and receive notifications when there is a new post or comment with the keyword specified.
This way, you can stay up-to-date about what your target audience is saying about you and your competitors and find out immediately if someone is seeking your services.
Monitor your brand mentions
Continuing along the same lines, if your self-branding efforts are bearing fruit and you’ve started to make a name for yourself on the social web, then it’s time to start monitoring your mentions to stay on top of what’s being said about you on the internet.
Using a social media monitoring tool like Mention, you can track and analyze mentions of your (or your company’s) name, competitors, and industry across the web — social media platforms, news aggregator sites, blogs, forums, and other online sources — in real time. You can set up alerts for specific keywords or phrases and respond to mentions directly from the tool, making life easier.
This way, you know how your target audience and prospects perceive you, what topics are associated with your brand, and where your name pops up the most. You can identify and tackle negative mentions or misconceptions about you and see which topics resonate most with prospects to create more compelling content and messages.
Moreover, Mention also provides you with detailed analytics on the reach and impact of your social media content, so you can measure the success of your branding efforts over time and make data-backed decisions about your future personal branding strategy.
Alternatively, you can set up Google Alerts to be notified when someone talks about you or your niche.
Collaborate with like-minded personalities
Sure, building a personal brand is a personal endeavor. But going at it alone will only take you so far.
Here’s how collaborating with like-minded personalities on social media channels can boost your branding efforts:
- Increased reach and visibility: Collaborating with other thought leaders exposes your brand to new audiences in your target market. Their followers will also see and engage with your content, which can help you gain new followers and boost your visibility.
- Credibility: Associating yourself with reputable people increases your credibility.
- Variety of content: Collaborating with other personalities can help diversify your content formats and ideas.
There are many ways to collaborate. For example, look for industry personalities with similar interests and collaborate on a joint project, such as creating an online course, ebook, or webinar.
Another way is to contact relevant industry leaders for expert advice and compile everything into a blog post. You can also appear as a guest on relevant podcasts or try doing a video interview on a relevant YouTube channel.
As long as a target audience overlaps, collaborating with like-minded personalities can advance your brand.
Bonus: Miscellaneous Quick Tips
As you increasingly share your brand story, post pictures, find groups, and publish high-quality content, keep in mind these critical best practices for creating a solid social media presence:
- Overposting: In the pursuit of consistency and authenticity, make sure not to go overboard with your posting frequency.
- Posting sporadically: On the flip side, do have a schedule for posting valuable content that can boost engagement consistently. A monthly Instagram photo won’t get you anywhere. Set a day or two aside to brainstorm, write, and schedule posts in advance using social media automation tools (like Mention).
- Inspirational quotes: These don’t add any value to your self-branding. But if you add your personality and unique insights to famous quotes for creating long-form posts, then it’s not a bad idea.
- Personal branding strategy: Be data-driven in achieving your branding goals. Start with a defined persona and brand voice, and set metrics (such as new connections made, number of inbound leads, etc.) that you can analyze each month and work upon.
- Professional attitude: There’ll be instances when your followers respond negatively. Don’t let it affect your values. Respond politely and ignore the hate.
- Study influencers connecting with you: As the introduction mentions, you must connect with people already invested in personal branding to establish your brand. Analyze how they use social media channels to engage with their target audience, brand voice, and online persona.
As you gain traction and expand your services, create content on other social media channels that make sense for your business.
Summary
A powerful personal brand essentially serves as your lead-generation engine in the digital world: positioning you as a niche thought leader that potential clients would organically approach when they need help.
It adds to your credibility and authority, helping you build an excellent reputation. In this journey, you’ll develop valuable connections on various social media networks and professional and leadership skills.
It’s never too late to increase brand awareness on social media platforms for your solo venture — optimize your profiles, find the right groups to engage with, post authentic content, and monitor your mentions.
Be consistent with your posting habits; with time, you’ll build a solid following that brings in more clients and referrals.
