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Personal branding for career success
Personal branding for career success

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4 Other ways to promote my brand online

Seven people sit in a row, each using different devices – tablets, laptops and phones.
Figure 4 Lots of ways to get online

There are many other social media platforms that you might consider using. Here’s a taste of the most popular.

Twitter

Twitter is an online news and social networking site where people communicate in short messages called tweets, which must be 280 characters or less. It has 330 million active users.

Gil (2018) explains: ‘The great majority of tweeters do this microblogging as a recreational thing, a chance to shout out to the world and revel in how many people choose to read your stuff. But there is a growing number of Twitter users who send out some really useful content. And that’s the real value of Twitter: it provides a stream of quick updates from friends, family, scholars, news journalists, and experts.’

In terms of personal brand promotion, you can use it to share your news and views. You can also gain useful insights through following others in your industry and can ‘retweet’ their messages, adding comments of your own.

Twitter etiquette suggests that you should follow people who follow you (unless you’re a public figure with a massive audience), so this can work well if you’re trying to get noticed by key people in your field. Again, it is important to tweet regularly to maintain your profile.

Instagram

Instagram is a social networking app for sharing photos and videos. It has 800 million users.

From a professional perspective, sharing images works well if you are in a creative industry or have a visual brand to promote. It also allows you to share what you do in a visual way.

The most popular Instagram users often mix images of their personal and professional lives, for example combining pictures of their working day alongside holiday shots or cakes they’ve made.

To use Instagram to promote your personal brand, you need to think again about your personal brand story. Can you encapsulate that visually? Would that be a useful approach?

Blogging

Watch this short video to find out more about what blogging is.

Video 3 What is a blog?
Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

When approaching your blog from a professional rather than personal perspective, Johnson (2018) suggests there are four reasons to blog:

  1. To increase your audience – invite them to connect
  2. To connect more deeply with prospective clients – sharing the real you
  3. To position yourself as an expert – show what you know
  4. To reach more people with your message – invite guest bloggers and you’ll reach their audience too.

When you start blogging, you’ll need to make sure it reaches your target audience. To do that, you can refer or link to your blog posts in email, on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. or you could invite people you admire to write guest posts for your blog.

Activity 4 Choose a platform

Timing: Allow about 20 minutes

Review the online platforms that have been discussed this week, i.e. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and blogging. Consider the way that others use them professionally and talk to colleagues, friends or family to find out what they use and why.

Choose the one that you are most likely to use to promote your personal brand and make a note of the platform and your reasons in the box below:

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Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Discussion

Depending on your circumstances, you may decide that promoting your personal brand online is not a priority now. But, as the digital world continues to grow and extend its influence over our professional lives, you may need to reconsider in the future.

Now that you’ve explored some of the options available to you for boosting your online profile, you’ll finish this week focusing on how to boost that profile in your current workplace.