Personal branding & Social Media Marketing

5 min readJul 12, 2021

Personal branding is the way in which you promote yourself to your audience and the general public. It is highly important and vital that you have a strategy and brand guide, a tone of voice, strong imagery and you remain consistent across your channels. Make sure you have your own original logo and design aesthetic that stands out, personable photography and a strong portfolio of work. Once you have a message you want to get across to your audience having strong personal branding can give you bigger opportunities to further your reach, engagement and build relationships with new clients and audience members.

Social media marketing

‘By following a combination of the personal branding tips such as being authentic, consistent and social you help increase your chances of success in your career.’ (Oberlo, 2021)

Fig 1. An example of good branding on **@luckandyak**’s Instagram account. Using bold colours, amazing photography and an inclusive range of content and positive language.

Social media is now a huge part of growing and marketing a brand, ‘an essential tool for professionals to develop and grow their personal brands.’ (SocialMediaToday, 2020) Each channel has a specific purpose and can be utilised differently to reach audience members. The best way to use social media for personal branding is to make sure you keep each account updated with relevant high quality interesting content that is very specific to the audience on that platform. For example Twitter is a microblogging platform and is great for connecting people, so it would be perfect for brand announcements, blog content and visual content. ‘Twitter is an excellent platform for building trust and relationships with your audience.’ (Tochukwu Okoro E, Medium 2020) You could link back to a previous blog post, for example my ‘Nike Marketing Mix’ blog using Nike’s social media handles and hashtags such as #digitalmarketingconsultant #Nikesmarketingmix #mediumblog

One of the biggest things that helps with posting across social media is using a content scheduler such as Hootsuite, Buffer or Later. This gives you time to plan ahead, duplicate posts for example if you are doing a ‘post of the week template’ and record analytics. After testing out different types of content you can also work out how often to post on each channel. For example, ‘Think of LinkedIn as your living resume.’ (SearchEngineJournal, 2020) This means that LinkedIn might be a platform you post on less frequently.

It is also very important to remember to post exceptional content. Your audience will become bored if they see repetitive posts that are not innovative. For example if you are posting on Instagram the algorithm decides what content to show people and this is linked back to engagement, your relationship with your audience, the hashtags you use, the quality of the content and other ranking signals. ‘….the Instagram algorithm is the set of rules that controls your content’s organic reach.’ (Hootsuite, 2021)

Facebook and Instagram are very good platforms when looking at influencers and developing relationships with them so that they can bring new audience members to your platforms. ‘Influencers usually have a large, engaged audience that brands can tap into to build credibility and even drive sales.’ (SingleGrain, 2021).

There are many important factors that play into great social media branding. By conducting research, I can see having a good solid strategy and conducting secondary research will help you to develop the best relationship with your audience.

Good examples of using social media for personal branding

Fig 2. How to Build a POWERFUL Personal Brand on Social Media 2021 STRATEGY

Vannesa Lau is an Online Marketing Strategist, she is also an influencer and has a very successful Youtube channel. This video is very recent and really insightful.

Fig 3. Nesha Woolery — How I create eight reels in a day

Nesha Woolery uses her knowledge around social media and marketing to create Instagram reels twice a week to share this with her followers. This is really engaging and her brand is very recognisable by the colour palette and high quality photography.

Roberto Blake has a brilliant blog which has a variety of great resources for his followers, including a lot of content focussed around social media, content creation and his successes on Youtube. His personal brand is very strong and heavily focussed around high quality photography and video to share his skills.

List of References

Facebook for Business: Everything You Need to Know, Max Freedman

How to Build a POWERFUL Personal Brand on Social Media 2020 STRATEGY!, Vanessa Lau

How to Build a Personal Brand, Tyler Basu

How to Create a Social Media Posting Schedule, Azure Collier

How to Use Content Marketing for Personal Branding, Pratik Dholakiya

How I create eight reels a day, Nesha Woolery

Personal Branding: How to Successfully Build Your Brand, Michael Stelzner,

Personal Branding vs. Corporate Branding: What’s The Difference?Octopus Creative

Roberto Blake Blog, Roberto Blake

The Importance of Personal Branding on Social Media in 2020 [Infographic], Andrew Hitchinson

The Top 10 Social Media Sites & Platforms 2021, Shelley Walsh, SearchEngineJournal