How to build a personal brand
In the current digital world, having a strong personal brand is more important than ever. Ready to start building yours?
How to Build a Personal Brand in 5 Steps:
1. Find-your-key-audience
Sometimes trying to appeal to everyone, appeals to no-one. So think - who will your story resonate with the most? Other young families, remote workers, industry peers? Concentrate your efforts on the right audience.
Determine what makes you unique and narrow down your areas of expertise to start building a personal brand others can relate to.
Keep your focus within your key audience and local communities. While your potential audience might be smaller, it’ll be much more relevant and open to what you have to say.
2. Choose the right platform
Don’t spread yourself too thin. Building a presence on a social media platform takes time, so be selective.
Start with the one more suited to your needs. A golden rule is to follow your audience. This is another reason why you need to know who they are. Where are they spending time on? Which platform will be the best to reach them?
This will help you focus your efforts and get the best results. When you’re feeling more confident with your profile, you can start expanding your social media presence to other platforms.
3. Make the most of your profile
First impressions count. An incomplete or impersonal profile harms your authenticity and discourages trust.
Choose a profile picture that shows your face clearly and starts establishing a personal connection. Fill in your bio with key information about you, your interests and what you can offer people. Add relevant keywords that will make your profile more discoverable.
Your handle should include your name. If you choose to mention UW as part of your handle and/or on your profile, make it clear that you are a Partner representing the brand. Don’t impersonate UW, or create a profile that doesn’t feel like it belongs to a real person. People make stronger connections to accounts they perceive as honest, transparent and authentic.
4. Define your content mix
If you’re focusing on selling all the time you’ll struggle to keep people interested. Good content is personal, engaging and generates conversation. Find the right mix for your page: posts that entertain, educate, make people laugh and inspire.
Create your own posts. You want to become a source of content that adds value to your community. By that, we mean real photography and video, not graphics with illustrations and text. Avoid copying and pasting content you find online, whether from Google, UW’s website/assets or other Partners too.
If you’re talking about UW or the Partner opportunity, establish a personal connection. Share real stories, case studies and experiences.
5. Engage your community
Taking the time to build community is equally as important as uploading original and engaging content.
Social media isn’t a place to broadcast and sell, it’s where you’ll make connections. It’s really important to dedicate time to nurture and grow your community for this reason.
You won’t build community if you’re the only one doing the talking. It’s called social media for a reason. So remember to reply to comments, send new connections a personal note, answer their questions and engage with your follower’s posts.
Your content plan
Use this template to craft a plan and get more out of the content opportunities at Power Up. Just make a copy of the document to your drive.
Social-Lingo
When we talk about algorithms in social media, we’re referring to the rules that determine which content will be displayed to a particular user first. Social media platforms keep these exact rules a secret. But we know these are based on your relationship with a user and the type of content they normally engage with.
Your username or a part of your social media profile’s link. It’s a good idea to use the same one across different platforms so it’s easier for others to find you.
Your username or a part of your social media profile’s link. It’s a good idea to use the same one across different platforms so it’s easier for others to find you.
Private messages sent through a social platform. If you don’t follow someone, they’ll likely end up in your requests inbox. It’s worth keeping an eye on this inbox to make sure you don’t miss any important messages.
Instagram or Facebook updates that last 24h. They’re perfect for more authentic, “in the moment” posts that might be too casual for a feed post. On Instagram, stories can be highlighted so they stay on your profile for longer. Each story only lasts 15 secs, but you can split a longer video into multiple stories. There are a range of features called stickers which can be used to engage your audience such as quizzes, photo prompts, GIFs, questions, etc.
How the content is displayed when someone logs into an app. Rather than being purely chronological, most social media feeds are controlled by an algorithm. When someone is scrolling through their news feed, make sure your content grabs their attention to make them stop scrolling.
When we talk about “feed posts” we’re referring to these more permanent content pieces that will be shown on someone’s news feed. It’s important to consider the overall look and feel of your feed (your page).
These tags allow you to check into a location or an event. They can increase the visibility of your posts and stories by exposing them to more people. Just remember to consider your privacy and safety needs when using them.
Tagging someone links to their social media profile. It’s a great way to make sure they’ve seen your post, so tagging the UW accounts helps us find good UGC (user-generated content) to share on the brand page. On Instagram, you can co-publish a feed post or a reel with another account.
Organic content is posted for free. This mean its reach is controlled by an algorithm and it’ll appear on your follower’s feed first. When you create interesting and useful content, your followers might share it. This will increase its reach beyond your followers. Paid social is when someone spends money to be seen by a more specific audience. These will be highlighted as ads. Remember as a Partner you should only use organic social, building community and engaging your audience without spending money on advertising. You should never run a paid social campaign.
This refers to the amount of unique accounts that have been exposed to a piece of content. It gives you a good indication of how many people you’ve been able to reach. The content will have appeared on their news feed at least once.
How many times a piece of content has appeared in front of people. It’s different to reach, because the same person might come across the content multiple times. Each time this happens, it’ll be added to the impressions count.
Short and entertaining vertical videos on Instagram. These are usually limited to a 1min, but some longer reels are in the process of being rolled out. Similar to TikTok, they have a range of editing tools and features that make it easy for anyone to have fun and express their creativity. Platforms like Instagram have been focusing a lot on this format. To benefit from this algorithm boost, it’s important to consider how to make Reels a key part of your content plans.
Stands for user generated content. This is when brands use social media activations from their online communities as their content. We want the UW channels to feature a lot more UGC from Partner accounts like yours.