Is Your Personal Brand Valuable?

Influencers such as Kendall and Kylie Jenner can make as much as $250-500k for a single sponsored Instagram post. While this may be a bit atrocious with income inequality and minimum wage being pressing issues, but ultimately the power to attract attention and influence people has immense value in companies’ eyes. Most of us can only dream of having the social influence of the Kardashian-Jenner clan, but building a solid personal brand is a good step towards leveraging any benefits. 

We all know someone who has a definite character and espouses a certain aura whenever they enter the room. This is the power of a “personal brand”. Personal branding requires enough people caring about the actions and opinions you have that they will follow along with the content you publish (in real life or online). Just as with companies building brands around product quality, personal brands stem from content quality. In order to make your personal brand valuable, these are the four rules to commit to heart.

Rule 1: Homogeny and diversity

In order to sell the best personal brand possible, you need to make sure you hit all of your demographics.  This means it is crucial for you to be on every platform.  Not only will cross-platform posting help you reach people who may only use certain networks, but also it allows you to have your posts seen potentially over 5 times by the same person.  Having this deep content reach increase the probability of long-term retention, post interaction, and “word-of-mouth” sharing. 

Now the two complications with maintaining multiple platforms are homogeny and diversity. Too frequently people’s various profiles all have different profile and cover photos, different bios, etc. Even if the information is all slightly similar and telling of you, keep all profile pictures and information identical across all platforms. This unified approach allows you to burn your name, image, and information into people’s minds, prevents possible confusion when consumers are searching for your accounts or skipping your posts in their feed, and most importantly leaves an underlying impression, since far too few are so crisp cross-platform.

Additionally, content diversity is key on different accounts since Twitter  users are not looking for the same stuff that Instagram users are. Keeping your tweets headline-esque, Instas artsy, Facebook posts minimal, and Pinterests aesthetical pleasing will do wonders for your audience connection rates.  Adding to this point even more, if you end up getting super-users who follow you cross-platform, you will want to give them unique posts on each app or else you risk having them convert back to sole-platform followers.

Rule 2: Beware of over promotion

Too many people get lost in the world of social media and forget how others are perceiving them on the other end.  Imagine those memes saying phrases such as “Tag a friend so they open their phone and see a random egg” and how awful that could be for your brand if you passed those emotions onto your followings.  Hyping yourself up, talking about one topics, sharing too many niche memes, videos, articles, or content can potentially lead to short term gains but if you milk it too much, you’re certain to cause damage.

Rule 3: Avoid droughts

Hands down the worst thing you can do for your personal brand is to stop talking.  If you are using content to market to people, without content you reach no one.  While it can be pretty mundane at points, taking the time to ensure all of your platforms are updated will pay off dividends in the long run.  A few of the best ways to avoid these droughts is to use a content scheduler, such as HootSuite, and be proactive about always having your content scheduled a few days in advance just in case something pops up.

Rule 4: Value and uniqueness

Take cues from Mahbod Moghadam, previous Genius founder and current Everipedia founder, who is infamous for his absurd tweets when brain-storming potential content. Moghadam fills a special niche in everyone’s feeds and for this reason has massed tens of thousands of social media followers. At the end of the day, everyone has a special something they are aiming to get out of social media and understanding what it is that people want and what they are currently consuming is key to establishing a solid social media base. No one wants to watch a new Snapchat “influencer” saying “Another one.” Keep the content fresh and valuable.

If you are stumped with what fresh take you can provide the world, think about what you are most natural with. Moghadam sheds light on startups and rap but with his own unique voice, which gives his content added spice. Finding your own unique voice and using the platforms as a means to speak with the masses is the first step you will need to take.