Social Media to build Personal Brand

You are a brand within yourself. While we appear for an interview or communicate with a
stranger we tend to talk about us, our achievements and our views. While doing this we’ve never
realized that we are selling ourselves to imprint a brand called ‘you’ in the minds of others. A
brand called "YOU" needs to be marketed now. William Arruda, “The Personal Branding Guru,”
and author of, “Ditch, Dare, Do: 3D Personal Branding for Executives,” says, “If you want to be
successful, you need to think of yourself as a personal brand. “Like a corporate brand that
represents a particular business entity, a personal brand is a manifestation of “you” on an
individual level. But not everyone can successfully pull this off. If you’ve been struggling with
how to brand yourself, social media is where you should begin.
In the era of ‘what sells is sold’, it is reasonable to believe that anything a human lays his eyes
on, is a commodity. It was just a matter of time before he looked into the mirror. Where the
attention span of a consumer is decreasing perpetually, the efforts to grab that attention is hard
now more than ever. So it is essential to understand this market and grab this opportunity before
it is too late.

Distinguishing yourself from the competition is important in any facet of business. Creating a
clear and concise image, reputation, and status in the professional world provides an edge,
whether searching for a first job, exploring a change in career, or looking to be more viable and
successful in your current career.
Like every corporation that brands a product, a personal brand is where “you” are the product
and you have to brand yourself. Social media is a powerful tool that helps you with it and allows
you to create a separate space for you in the market.

In an environment filled with philosophy, antipathy, and cut throat competition social media
gives a riveting experience of actually doing something meaningful. Online tools like Twitter,
blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, and so on have created an enormous opportunity for individuals
to build their reputations and create networks with unprecedented reach. No longer are you
confined to do business or create relationships with people you know in face-to-face meetings.
Instead, you can grow your network exponentially, with people from all around the globe.

To begin with using social media to build yourself as a brand or your own brand the 1st key idea
is communicating your thoughts. With the advent of the novel Coronavirus pandemic, social
media apps are the media through which almost all brands have shifted to for communication.
Even the biggest of the names in the fashion world- where fashion shows are everything you can
do to reach out to the mass, have shifted to social media to communicate their brands and ideas
during this pandemic. For example during Paris Fashion Week, Kenzo had a Listen First Interest
Score of 67,549, meaning they had more Wikipedia page views and Twitter handle and hashtag
mentions between Sep 28 – Oct 6, 2020 than any other presenting brand. Louis Vuitton had the
most successful video of the Fashion Week Shows Listen First tracked this Fall, receiving
2,791,772 video views on YouTube for the presentation of their Spring-Summer 2021 Collection
at La Samaritaine.

So in order to successfully place yourself out there, here are some ways to leverage social media
to your benefit.

1. Identify and materialize your goals.

It is very crucial to identify the outcome you expect out of your personal brand. It is a
mandate to set a mission for your branding. Do you want to start a new business? Or
differentiate your brand from a pre-existing competition? Or earn more profit through
increased sales? It is necessary to analyse the reason for why you want to market yourself.
The reason can be anything starting from wanting to initiate a new business to expanding
your pre-existing brand.
Once you have identified your goals it is time to materialize them i.e., give them numbers.
For example, if you want to expand your painting, as a brand then you have to know and
realize the number of viewers or followers that you need by the end of a certain amount of
time over any platform. Say you need a thousand views over next week on Pinterest. It will
not only help you to properly channelize your energy but will also act as a measurement of
the rate of success of your efforts.

2. Define your areas of expertise.

The area of expertise is more complicated than it sounds. For example, today the painting
vertical itself comprises of more than 100 categories, for example, Manga, Portray, Abstract,
etc. It will not only help you to personalize your brand but will also help you personalize
your audience. This will then be reflected in all your social media profile descriptions. It will
not only help as a keyword that sets atone for your brand but will also help in creating a
SEO-friendly content.
3. Be Ubiquitous.

The difference between a social media presence and a social media establishment is that a
social media establishment has a strong presence in every section of the internet that could
grab the attention of the potential customers.
It is very essential that one must have multiple social media channels to reach out to their
audience.

4. Establish a strategy.

A goal without a plan is a dream. It is very important for an individual to plan out their social
media branding. It is almost as important as the business itself. If your goal is to attract more
people, then your focus should be on creating quality content.
And one must always remember that “Consistency is almost as important as the quality of the
content itself.”

5. Update yourself.

As it is clear by now that it is very hard to stay relevant in the market for more than a blink of
an eye. With the perpetual nature of change in the market, it is very important to keep up
with this change. Even when you feel like your brand is well established, if you do not keep
up with the change it will become the news of the past. Hence analysing the market trends
and giving a product it is one of the most important aspects of self-branding.

6. Charity Begins at home.

“The biggest problem most people have with embracing the power of online network-ing and
personal brand building is they don’t know where to start.
For those people who are trying to start personal branding via social media, the best
customers that you can have is your own surroundings. Your friends, colleagues, and family
are some of the few people who will give you the right image about yourself before you can
officially launch yourself into the bigger ground. It will not only help you to gain confidence
but will also set the tone for your future endeavours.
 7. Embracing the power of Social media

Social media is the new oil that needs to be mined more and more day by day. Facebook
recently changed its brand name to Meta. “Metaverse” as Facebook went on to say is an
embodied internet. According to Facebook, Metaverse marks the advent of an evolution of
how people will connect. From desktop to web to mobile phones and from text to photos to
videos; but this line doesn't ends here. With the technology gearing up such a rapid pace it’s
only a matter of time that business will flow with the stride and start new channels of
delivery. At such a tech- savvy era social media has a part to play in making oneself a brand
worth recognizing.
The Internet is a wide set of protocols, technology, tubes and languages, plus access devices 
and content and communication experiences atop them and social media is a player which
can give an edge.

The theory of personal branding was not an instant hit. It simmered for many years and was
considered as nothing short of a fad and was going to extinguish before people even come to
know of this concept. For personal branding, actively and engagingly using social media dates
back to the times when Facebook entered the market. People switched to Facebook to promote
their brands and advertise their potential and identity. But what actually disrupted the market was
Instagram. Instagram is especially effective for growing and scaling one’s personal brand.
Giving people a glimpse into your life is the most effective way to build your personal brand by
giving them the opportunity to meet the "real" you. Instagram flourishes at the crossroads of
creativity, community, and culture. Businesses can create worlds that will immerse, entertain,
and excite their audiences using augmented and virtual reality technologies, some of which are
already available and some of which are yet to be developed. Immersive experiences have
limitless potential, and brands are eager to experiment with AR/VR and bring new and exciting
experiences to life. But now looking at the trends it can be seen that the winds are blowing to the
other side of the hills.

We are also seeing a major shift in branding on another new platform as well. Enter: TikTok.
Where in the past we are habituated to seeing beauty and fashion influencers taking illustrious
photos for other social media platforms, we are now seeing a quirkier, and perhaps even more
enjoyable side to them.
The TikTok platform's growth and creativity has piqued the interest of top fashion houses such a
s Balmain, Dior, and Givenchy, who want to establish a presenceon the platform and learn from t
he creatvity of native creators.Brands are increasingly turning to content creators for insights on 
how to create high
quality content. Brands' conversations are shifting from wanting a glossy unrealistic photo to enc
ouraging fun, authentic, and creative video content. Furthermore, the platform is always looking 
for new ways to add value to the community.TikTok is providing a new platform for the market
to showcase their art and personalities. Within the wake of this development, engagement has
skyrocketed for the larger part of influencers and brands are moving their informing in like
manner.

Social media is a boon in disguise to build your personal brand. It is vast and immeasurable
potential to build yourself as a brand is all yours to tap. It’s massively silly to not recognize its
effective capacity for posts to be generally monetizable and has the potential to skyrocket one’s
identity from an individual to a whole new level of a brand within themselves.