The first step towards succeeding online is positioning yourself strategically and you do that through proper online (personal) branding.
Building a successful personal online brand involves first understanding how you wish your brand to be perceived and coming up with strategic approaches to building your online brand.
The first approach is simple! - you have to start seeing yourself as a brand and deliberately work towards building a good reputation.
Before now, your personal brand could be communicated with a single business card, now it cuts across social media profiles. In this age, your personal brand is the perception people have when they’re on your profile, website or see your updates.
In this digital age, most businesses and individuals will check you out online before carrying out any transaction with you.
Personally, most of the top companies I have worked with have visited my online profiles (Facebook, Twitter, etc) to check me out.
This really can't be avoided as when you’re sending out emails/proposals, you’d have to include your name. People and businesses now use that information to look you up and when they see some of the silly posts you’ve been making or that poor profile photo of yours, the hundreds of companies you're working with, it sends a bad message about you.
The truth is businesses and individuals want to perceive people they're transacting with as professionals. The good news is you can give them that perception by building a strong online brand.
Branding yourself online is the easiest way to take control of how people perceive you online. It involves taking control of the things you post and even the comments you make. In fact, you have to be deliberate about everything you do online; whether it’s on WhatsApp, Facebook groups, etc.
When branding yourself across social networks, the key things to take into considerations include; your intro, profile photo, cover photo, place of work and your network of friends, etc.
Are you interested in learning how to stand out online? this is the first post in my personal online branding series, follow me so you don't miss upcoming updates.
See you at the top!