3 Using Facebook to promote my brand
Facebook is a social networking website and service where users can post comments, share photographs and links to news or other interesting content on the Web, play games, chat live, and stream live video (Nations, 2018).
It currently has over 2 billion active users worldwide.
After LinkedIn, it is the second most likely platform to be used by recruiters when evaluating your brand.
Facebook has traditionally been focused on connecting family and friends and allowing them to share content, images, etc. Increasingly, it is used as a tool by professionals to promote what they do, building communities of like-minded individuals to share content with and advertise services to.
As with LinkedIn, this means that Facebook offers lots of groups you can join and contribute to. This is another excellent way to build and promote your personal brand. You could even start a group yourself.
The key to success when using any social media platform to raise awareness of your brand, is to post comments, ideas and content regularly. This can be time consuming and our dedication to it can slip when our lives are busy. So, if you’re going to use social media, make sure you have time to commit to the process.
Caution: Don’t forget what you learned in Week 5 about the potentially negative impact of saying the wrong things. If you’re voicing opinions on controversial subjects, such as politics or religion, think carefully about whether that is something that will align with the personal brand you want to promote.
Activity 3 What could I post about?
Even if you don’t plan to use Facebook, creating ideas for posts is a useful exercise. These ideas could also be used for blogs, work-place discussions with like-minded individuals, etc.
1. Pick a theme. Choose something that you know about, enjoy, or have strong feelings about. It doesn’t have to be work-related, it could relate to a hobby or interest. The point of this exercise is to experience the process of generating ideas. If you find it useful, you can repeat it in the context of your career ambitions later.
Write your theme here:
2. Now come up with a list of different ways you could talk about that theme.
For example, if you chose a hobby, like knitting or crochet, as your theme you could:
- pick a special day that’s coming up, e.g. Mother’s Day, Christmas etc., and talk about ideas for relevant designs
- offer advice about a tricky technique
- talk about what you most enjoy about the hobby
- address an issue that you know other knitters feel strongly about.
Write your ideas here. Keep going until you run out of ideas.
3. Finally, look back through those ideas and reflect on how they align with your personal brand. For example, there might be links to your values, strengths, experience, etc.
List any connections here:
Discussion
While you might not want to post or blog or even talk about your hobbies as a way to promote your personal brand, you can see how sharing something about yourself can be used to give others a sense of what you stand for and have to offer.
It can be a daunting task to share personal views/thoughts, etc. in this type of forum, especially as we are all aware of the negative feedback we might receive. Choosing the right groups and finding the right, ‘authentic’ voice is an important part of the process.
However, what you share doesn’t have to be personal. You might choose to curate the content of other experts or organisations – pulling it together and posting it so that others can be informed and inspired without having to search for the content themselves.
In the next section, you’ll look at some of the other online platforms that you can use to promote your brand.