Be First in the Personal Branding Rodeo
Building your personal brand is a great way to promote your skills and value beyond your company. It’s perfect if you’re looking to gain more prestige in the field and want to take your success with you if you switch companies or clients. Perfecting your online brand will help you if you are a fantastic individual whose work transcends the individual companies you work for.
Social Media Prowess
You are a fantastic peach of a human being who has some great things to share with people in your business niche, then there’s so much you can show off! Why not connect with those people via social media and share all of those tips and tricks!
LinkedIn is a brand-building powerhouse, especially if you’re looking to talk to other businesses or address your comrades in the field. It gets some of the highest engagement and helps solidify the professional image of your personal brand. The best part about LinkedIn is that you can be a little pushier. Hashtagging articles you’ve written, sharing the “how” to your fantastic success, and commenting on other people’s excellent work will help you become an integral part of the online community.
Building Your Name
Building your professional name is great after you’ve forged connections on social media. Some light SEO will help you rank for yourself.
Creating your own website can help you form professional connections, giving you a place to host your accomplishments, link to advice articles, and give interested people a platform to contact and interact with you. That means setting up G-Analytics and Search Console for your site, linking back to your website in things you share online, and connecting your social media to your site. If your name is super common, consider putting a qualifier on your name (a middle initial, location, or title) to remove confusion. It’s best to have a landing page they can go to that is controlled by you, that way they don’t get lost in the Twitter/LinkedIn maze. It’s important for name building for those who want to find you.
Connect Without Stepping On Toes
It can be hard to brag about how awesome you are if you are doing it for another company — especially if they already shared without a mention.
Before you share, be sure to get permission from the client and offer to tag the people, places, and things that you’re sharing. If your social media and website are professional, then your company and clients shouldn’t mind getting more attention and PR from you. Permission to share your work before you do so is important. Your clients might have nondisclosure agreements.
Dealing With Personal PR Issues
You have a fantastic website and are connected with people on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in a meaningful way.
But something came up.
Maybe you got a traffic ticket, a mugshot, or a terrible review. Whatever it is, it might be starting to outrank your kick-ass professional pages. There is a way to handle it. If it’s a legal or client issue, resolve the actual problem first. Whether you need to deal with the legal issue or were just blindsided by a client you need to call, deal with the actual problem before you try to salvage your reputation. It likely cannot be removed from the web, so it is way better to explain that the situation was appropriately resolved than explaining that you are guilty. It’s not often you can force a site to take down a review or mugshot, but you can outrank it with all the awesome positive things you do.
Personal branding is important. Starting to build a professional base that interacts with the community in a meaningful way will help you build a hearty brand. Posting appropriate content and staying on top of PR issues when they arise will help you maintain that professional brand for a long time.
