A company stands out in the crowd – in terms of increased sales, more awareness, and better customer experience because of a strong and value-focused brand.
For instance, the Adidas brand is a company known for sporting success.
As a sportsperson, you are confident about any product you see the Adidas logo on. That is the value the brand has projected to its customers over time.
In the corporate world, branding reflects a company’s values, how it acts and serves the people, and how those values are projected. It is what a company stands for. However, it is not just for companies.
Professionals have unique goals, interests, skills, values, and stories to share. And in an ever-growing digital world, having a personal brand is expected.
I want to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how you can grow your personal brand because whether you are a founder or an entrepreneur, it is hard to become known, especially if you do not define your personal brand.
I will give you a little tour of how to do it. I hope that by the end of this article, you will know what you need to do to develop your personal brand, be seen on social media, what to say, how to connect, and use some pro-level tips.
Table of Contents
- What Is a Personal Brand?
- How To Build a Personal Brand on Facebook
- How To Build a Personal Brand on LinkedIn
- How To Build A Personal Brand On Twitter
- How To Drive Engagement To Reach More People
- Is Paid Social Media Post Boosting an Option?
- Is Your Brand Googleable?
What Is a Personal Brand?
A personal brand is similar to corporate branding (a company’s all-inclusive marketing strategy) in many ways – but more personal as it is who you are, what you stand for, and the values you want to project to others.
Personal branding is steps/plans, actions, and guidelines that prove you are who you say you are when we look at your identity and values.
A personal brand helps individuals market or communicate their identity and core values to potential employers or clients.
Several aspects are involved in building a personal brand, but in an ever-growing digital world, building your personal brand is vital in the online space.
Having a personal brand online is synonymous with having an online presence and can be achieved by growing an online presence on social media platforms and through a personal brand website or portfolio.
Let me show you what it means to build your personal brand across different social networks.
How To Build a Personal Brand on Facebook
Many people use Facebook as a user. For instance, if you click on my user profile, you will see my posts, videos, and photos I have posted, as well as the number of friends I have on Facebook.
What I want you to do, as a young entrepreneur, is to create a public figure page. Search for me on Facebook, and you will find my profile and public figure accounts. The latter is a business page called Dennis Yu. With it, you can access ads and analytics.
On my business page, you can see that I have different posts that look personal and friendly, where I am interviewing other people in our industry, speaking at conferences, and hanging out with clients.
You want to use inception here when you influence people who influence your target market or people who you want to buy your product or service, especially if it is a SaaS.
You want people to see who your other customers are in a non-sales way. So I can come here and create ads.
I also want you to know about the power of videos. They can be powerful when you make short vertical or horizontal videos on your smartphone without making them look like ads.
When you make videos like that, you get people to believe you are bigger than you are. That is the whole thing about trying to look big.
I asked my buddy, Grant Cardone, to record a video on how to make one-minute videos. Here is what he did.
Grant made a video rather than talk about making a video. The key to making one-minute videos is to capture the audience’s attention. Grant was recording it on his phone, and then his little girl came in and interrupted unexpectedly. That is perfectly fine.
What he did was get your attention. You are not trying to make a professional video. You are just trying to humanize the person behind the camera.
Now, what I did next was to boost the video using ads so 130,000 people saw it, many of whom were fans of Grant, and I got this for maybe half a penny for each person to watch my video.
So think about the stories that you want to tell, and think about your product. Think about your idea and story as a founder.
Talk about how you are solving problems and everything except for, “Hey, we have a cool software product. Sign up for a demo. I would love to spend 15 minutes with you.”
You could certainly do that, but you want to earn the right to get people’s attention, and you can see here that this is driving more people who want to engage. That is how you build relationships at scale.
How To Build a Personal Brand on LinkedIn
Now, I want to show you the same thing on LinkedIn.
If we come to LinkedIn, you will see that I have 30,000 connections. I make different posts and often just cross-post from other channels like Twitter, where I take a screenshot and then say, “Hey, who is with me on this one?”
That moves people to engage by liking, sharing, and dropping their comments, which I also reply to and engage in further discussions. That is how you drive engagement on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn will be fantastic for you to drive business development and partnership deals because you put things out there about what you believe in that is tied to the values of your product and talk about challenges.
When you are authentic, which you have heard before, but in a professional and empathetic way, you will see all these people wanting to engage with you.
Engagement on LinkedIn can also be driven by resharing content, honoring people, or just writing a realization that you had. You help people learn about you when you put content out.
I am showing you how to build more leads. You need people to buy your product at scale. You can do that by hiring salespeople and taking lots of meetings.
The thing I see with lots of young entrepreneurs is they listen to advice their friends and family give. Those people are well-meaning, but you need to talk to your customers, people who actually will buy. They should be people currently going through the pain you are trying to solve.
How To Build A Personal Brand On Twitter
Here is an example of what I did for my friend, Jan, who runs the Virtual Summit Mastery. I wanted to help them drive more sales by making a tweet he gave me. I used my account because I have the blue check and over 70,000 followers.
What I did next was to make another tweet to edify him by saying, “Hey, I learned this from Jan. He is amazing.”
It is another secret of content creation many people do not know. The secret to influencing is to use a technique for building business relationships. It works across all channels. I think this is something you can apply right away.
Looking at my analytics, I have tweeted 518 times in the last 20 days. That is about 20 tweets a day. I would go on a rampage and tweet ten times at once because I had a thought in the shower. Anytime a thought crosses my mind, I will go ahead and tweet that.
You can tweet about anything, such as honoring other people, providing thoughts on your food, or just showing you are a person so that you are not just being a consumer. That is how most people use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
There will always be an angle that ties back to what I am doing and care about, such as knowledge and relationships because that will ultimately help sell my product. People buy because they identify with who you are.
How To Drive Engagement To Reach More People
Over 20 days, I got 861,000 impressions from my tweets, so maybe a quarter million. On most days, some tweets get as much as 60,000 impressions. On other days, it gets as low as 30,000.
You cannot predict which tweet will take off, so just put a lot of stuff out there.
Here is the point. There is no limit to the number of tweets you have. There is no penalty. With Facebook, you can post once or twice a day. On LinkedIn, post once a day. On Twitter, you can post 50 times a day with no penalty.
That is cool because if you post, it will just go right to the top of the feed. So, the more followers you have, the more people will be able to see it, which results in more engagement to drive the algorithm and more reach.
A couple of weeks ago, I made a post to share a failure that happened. It was a LinkedIn post, but I re-posted it to Twitter.
And this can go for my other social media posts, too. I would take my top Facebook posts and post them to Twitter or YouTube. Sometimes, I take my YouTube content and post it to a blog. I can reuse content between all of these different channels.
That is to show you that you can reuse content from channel to channel, so you do not have to worry about trying to create different content for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, your blog, or whatnot.
I received 1,000 engagements out of the 10,000 impressions on the post. That is a 10% engagement rate in general.
On social networks, you want a 10% engagement rate. It means that for every ten people who view your posts, you want one of them to like, comment, or share. When that happens, you will keep getting more reach.
So, if you are not getting engagement on social media, that is okay.
You need to get a few people to start engaging, and even if just one person engages, that can be enough to drive a deal. That person can run a conference or invite you on their podcast. That will give you access to another 10,000 people.
Is Paid Social Media Post Boosting an Option?
Let me tell you a little secret most people do not know. You can boost a post to get lots of extra traffic. It is easy.
I have a whole course because the topic is deep, but I want to show you this one simple thing you can do to boost important posts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to ensure you get better reach.
Posts that get engagement on social media will reach a significant number of people organically. But with post promotions or boosting, you have the advantage of micro-targeting to the exact audience that you intended for your post.
Some of these posts show they are already being promoted. What does that mean? It means that I spent money to drive ads against them. The ads can micro-target people who are fans of a competitor or someone else. If they follow someone, I want them to buy my software.
If you are looking to boost your social media posts, ideas, blog, products, services, or books organically, there are two ways to go about that. First, you can allow an anonymous user to share it on their timeline. That is what I did with Yan.
Secondly, you can promote it on your timeline with your followers. But to implement the second part, you should focus on increasing your audience so that your voice becomes louder.
Write more posts and share regularly to build on the audience. If you have limited posts and do not write regularly, repurpose your posts’ headlines (including curiosity phrases) and add interesting images to portray your idea.
Building a successful personal brand on social media takes time. It is a marathon, not a sprint. So keep posting regularly, and you will see the benefits in the long term.
Is Your Brand Googleable?
In a world where online presence is synonymous with brand existence, visibility on search platforms like Google becomes critical. But how do you know if you’ve built a strong enough digital footprint?
Google Autocomplete: A Litmus Test for Brand Strength
Start with a simple yet telling exercise: type your name or your company’s name into Google’s search bar. The type-ahead search results—Google’s autocomplete suggestions—are more than just a convenience feature. They are a reflection of your brand’s strength and recognition. If your name pops up before you’ve even finished typing, congratulations! You’ve carved out a distinctive space in the digital ecosystem.
Understanding Your Digital Footprint with Google Trends
Google Trends is a powerful tool that measures the interest in specific search terms over time. By entering your name or company name into Google Trends, you can assess how often people are searching for you or your business. If the results show thumbnails or related search queries, it’s a good indicator that your personal or company brand is well-optimized and recognizable as an entity on the web.
For individuals and businesses keen on understanding their “Googleability”, these approaches provide a straightforward metric to measure the effectiveness of your branding efforts. Are you Googleable? Do your potential customers or followers find you when they search online?
