In today’s digital world your digital identity or personal brand is as important as your business brand. Branding is essential in entrepreneurship, but personal branding on social media boosts your business brand. Personal branding is critical to your online identity and presence. Your social media identity adds to the success of your business.

Your personal brand already exists in the online world as almost all of us are already active online. What you need to do is curate and craft it in order to develop your distinct digital identity.

Whatever you say or write on digital and social platforms, the story you tell, the pictures and images you share, the graphics you use, all these contribute to the building of your personal brand and your digital identity. Sharing online crafts your digital online persona which reflects your values and skills.

Personal branding is the process of developing your public persona meant for your targeted audience. It is done by carefully communicating your beliefs, values, thoughts, views, goals and purpose.

When you write comments on social media sites, or publish a blog, it creates your personal brand or identity. Whatever you write or like or share reveals certain aspects of your personality. Your personal brand evolves & develops around the content you post on social sites. It is imperative to carefully build your personal brand, otherwise you will not have any control over it. People will perceive a particular image of yourself and your business. If you take control of your personal brand, you will be in the driver’s seat as you can control the narrative. By controlling your personal branding you can curate aspects of your personality and present yourself in the best possible manner.

Benefits of Personal Branding

There are several benefits of personal branding. By personal branding, you put a face behind your business brand. Business brands use celebrities to promote their products. You may not be a celebrity, but you are a unique person who has unique knowledge and interesting stories to share with others. Your personal brand is your unique digital identity which conveys your personality, your dreams, your hopes and your motivations.

Enhanced Online Visibility

As you do more personal branding, your online visibility increases to your audience and you become more accessible. You may be found with a simple Google search. People can interact with you on various channels and sites more easily. Especially, in the knowledge commerce market, such visibility is highly beneficial.

Leveraging Your Network

As your online personal brand grows, your network also grows. This network may be of potential customers, current customers, industry people and other people interested in your brand. This ever-growing network becomes a huge asset in growing your business. If you are launching something new, or taking a new direction, this network becomes valuable. As more and more people know about your personal as well as business brand, you become more visible and your business grows. As people share your content among their own networks, your online reach grows.

You Become More Recognizable in Person

Personal branding not only helps you increase your online visibility, it makes you more recognizable in person. When you participate in business promotion events like trade shows, conventions or conferences, your online visibility makes you more recognizable. Getting noticed more in person helps you build your personal brand even more.

Business Becomes Stronger

Personal branding helps your business and your business brand helps your personal brand although they are distinct from each other.

Building Partnerships

You can build a partnership and create something together with your partner. Thus, you both can reach each other’s audiences. This helps expand your personal branding. You can use your personal brand to connect with individuals in your industry whose audiences intersect with your own.

Online Relationships Flourish

Personal brands are a big help in maintaining strong and regular online relationships with your audience and peers, which can be difficult with only your business brand. It is because a personal brand makes you more visible and approachable online. That makes it easier for people to get in touch with you and interact with you.

Confidence Building

When you indulge in personal branding, you take a bold step as you put yourself up for public scrutiny. However the risk taking is a confidence boosting exercise. As your audience grows, you start feeling confident about sharing your thoughts online. This confidence also stretches into other areas of your business.

Your Brand Image is Controlled by You

You must control your personal brand image. Do not let people form their own wild opinions about you. When you build your digital identity, you control your brand image by being purposeful about what you share online. You must control your narrative by controlling what information you release about yourself. Even if you commit a mistake, you can put it in the correct perspective before your audience.

Credibility Grows

Credibility is very important for your image. The more credibility you have the more people will invest in your digital offerings and products. In order to build your credibility you shall share value based, information-rich content with your audience.

Goals Become Achievable

Though building a personal brand is a lot of work, the fruits are greater than the time and effort spent on building a personal brand. People know you better and start trusting your judgment, this makes achieving goals much easier. You may be able to attract more visitors to your website and thus be able to sell more of your products.

As you develop a personal connection with your audience, customer retention also becomes easier. Every time you release something new, people will keep on buying it because they have trust in the value you give. This trust is developed through your personal brand.

The Best Personal Branding Strategies

Believe It-You Are a Brand

As soon as you have a presence on the internet, you become a brand. Unless you believe that you are a brand yourself how will you build it? However powerful your business brand may be, still your personal brand is also a factor. The best example is Bill Gates - he is a powerful brand himself distinct from Microsoft.

Use Your Personality

Your personality is unique about you. It sets you apart from everyone. You may have traits like bravery, helpfulness, meticulousness, introversion, extroversion, selflessness, fearlessness etc. which people may have noticed and commented on in the past. Harness these personality traits and develop your digital identity based on your personality. Amplify the traits which stick to you and by building upon that you can make your personal brand stronger.

Your Strengths and Weaknesses

In order to make your personal brand look authentic, you will have to accept your strengths and weaknesses. Try to paint yourself as human as possible. Do not try to give the impression that you know the answers to all the questions in the world. An important requirement for building your true personal brand is to be honest about yourself.

Curating Your Online Presence

It is also important that you curate your online presence and digital identity. You must set your own boundaries. How much personal information you want to share or not. Many people keep their families totally off limits. Some people do not hesitate in posting personal photographs, anecdotes and other information about their families. It is only you who has to decide how much of your persona you want to show to the online and social media world. It is you only who will decide how much you want to share about your education, struggles and achievements, your work history, or anything else about yourself.

Provide Value

Always try to share content which provides some value to the reader who is interested in your posts and your personal brand. Even your personal anecdotes shall carry some sort of value like cautioning against something. Always respond to people’s comments and questions on your social media posts.

Every Share Must Have a Purpose

Whenever you share something, whenever you post something, there must be some purpose behind it. Your every interaction with your audience on social media must have some purpose. This is very important because once your audience gets disappointed with you, they will not return to your posts or website. They may think that your personal brand has nothing to offer and might start looking at competitors.

You Can Reinvent Yourself

If you make a mistake in building up your personal brand, you can reinvent yourself. Only necessary thing is to share the reason behind the change. Just share the reason and thought behind your reinvented ideas and be transparent about your beliefs and goals.

Conclusion

It can easily be concluded that building your personal brand is extremely important today. Your digital identity goes a long way in giving you an online image which helps your business brand too. The benefits of personal branding have been explained above. Though, developing a strong personal brand is not easy, it can be done by following the ideas given in this article.

PERSONAL BRANDING

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