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Social Media is a key aspect to a personal branding campaign

Author: Mark Scott, Social Media Thinker, DOC Marketing, April 2012

Social media is a key element to any personal branding campaign by using various platforms from Linkedin to Facebook.

What Social Media does is allows you to build your own audience. It gives you a voice and a microphone and the opportunity to let YOU be heard.

You are an expert in your field offline but you need to you let the online world know that you’re an expert too. So you start a blog and write a number of articles but that is not enough, so what’s next?

You need to be participating and interacting in discussions that are happening in Social Media that are relevant to your expertise. That way your voice can be heard and people will start to notice you. This might be on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or a niche online community. Social media helps your voice to spread across various platforms rapidly and can enhance your personal brand.

By participating in Social Media it gives you the opportunity to meet with a vast network of people and for your articles to be shared as Twitter can help you tell people who you are, what you do and why you do it and help you create attention to you and increase the your goal in becoming a strong personal brand.

An important factor when using social media is to think about what you are going to Tweet or post on your blog as you are trying to build your personal brand it could also damage your reputation with just one tweet. While you are participating you need to monitor what people are saying about you online as this also need focus as you have wrote an article and or made a comment in a forum which may result in a negative comment towards you, you need to act on this as if the negative comment appears in Google, which a client or future client may pick up this can be detrimental to your personal brand.

In regards to your social media profiles not only do they need to all have the same branding and but they need to be kept update and managed correctly right down to the content that is posted on them. For example with the new Facebook Timeline, this has many opportunities for personal branding such as mapping out your career on the Timeline. Also with the subscribe function on Facebook, this can be used to share your articles to your network.

On Google+ you are able to share your content with relevant people in your network, this can help you become known for a certain topic for example “personal Branding”.

Another great way social media can help your personal brand and expertise is developing relationships with bloggers by sharing their content and commenting on their blog or articles.

Social media is a huge part to developing your personal brand online, you just need to ensure it is managed and monitored correctly.