Developing your online personal brand

Oct 07, 2010

Table of contents:

1. Maintain a consistant theme
2. Customise your activity for each community
3. Quality, not quantity
4. Be yourself

In order to fully develop your online brand its important to follow these guidelines when setting up on various social media services. Here are some top tips for getting the most from your online brand.

Maintain a consistant theme

Developing a personal brand is exactly the same as developing a corporate brand, consistancy is key. If you were setting up social media profiles for a company you wouldn’t have different colour schemes, different logos or different account names, so try and keep each social media account consistant with your other profiles.

• Maintain the same colour scheme on sites such as Twitter, WordPress or Tumblr to show consistancy
• Try and get the same account name on each site, or stay within a slight variation if it is not possible
• Keep the same profile image on each service, you want people to recognise you at a glance

Customise your activity for each community

Each social media service is different from the others, thats what seperates them and makes them so popular. The way you speak out on Twitter is different from the way you would talk on LinkedIn. Don’t just copy and paste your personal details to each account. Take the time to personalise each service in order to get the best out of them. Remember what you contribute to each community will be different also.

Quality, not quantity

When it comes to updating your social media profiles remember you don’t need to be the most active person on the site to gain the best reputation. 1000 tweets a day won’t get you much of a following, or 1000 bland and boring photos on Flickr won’t give the impression that you are an awesome photographer. Try and keep it a manageable and comfortable level. When posting links to Twitter don’t post an RSS feed type links, post only the best of what you consumer and try and personalise each tweet with your opinion. I don’t recommend services such as ping.fm as serving each community should be unique and blasting out messages to multiple profiles defeats this, but if you do chose to use a broadcasting service DON’T AUTOMATE!

Be yourself

When interacting online it is extremely important to just be yourself. If you wouldn’t harass someone in the street, don’t do it online. If you wouldn’t constantly shout things or repeat yourself at work, don’t do it online. If you wouldn’t be derogatory to your friends, don’t do it online! In order to get the best out of social media the most important aspect is being social. This might seem obvious, but if you are a company that is just blasting out adverts, you doing it wrong. Be yourself, be personal, connect with others like you would in real life and you’ll do just fine.