Want to establish yourself as a thought-leader, stand out on social media, and build your professional legacy?
It is crucial to create and maintain a strong online brand to establish credibility with your intended audience. This credibility drives organic growth in your reputation, positioning your as a thought leader.
As Ron Carucci, leadership strategy contributor on Forbes notes, in any knowledge economy, your thought-leadership is the currency of the day.
Established thought leaders are using social media to actively build and nurture their brands through thoughtful content curation and personalized engagement.
These statistics show that leaders must consider investing in social media branding and shape both their professional image and the brand of the company.
In this blog, we’re going to explore how to brand yourself on social media while avoiding brand failures and social media fails:
Packaging Yourself: The Significance of Personal Branding
Your online presence is scrutinized by potential employees, investors, customers, board of directors and other key stakeholders. You need to create a brand persona that resonates with who you are, what you do, and your target audience.
Personal branding addresses the question, “Why should we choose you?” by effectively highlighting your strengths, personality, and authentic narrative. This approach is essential for distinguishing yourself amidst the noise generated by social media, artificial intelligence, and marketing technology, ultimately helping to prevent brand failures.
Why do you need a leader’s personal branding when your company has invested in corporate branding? Well, while corporate branding focuses on the identity and reputation of an entire organization and targets a broader audience, personal branding is all about who you are professionally and personally, and your online connections. With personal branding, you get the flexibility and adaptability that allows you to grow in your career goals while promoting the business you work with and for.
To add to that, statistics from Go Globe show that CEO engagement on social media has resulted in 78% of CEOs having enhanced strategic communication, improved brand image for 71%, and enhanced transparency for 64%. These statistics underscore the importance of establishing a robust online presence for leaders as it enables them to convey their brand persona and narrative effectively.
How To Brand Yourself On Social Media
1. Identify Your Executive Brand Identity
Executive brand identity is the visible characteristics of your leadership personality that differentiate a brand from the crowd. It consists of different elements such as leadership style, industry expertise, personal values, unique value proposition, target audience, professional image, and social responsibility that shape your image. It helps you curate content and use a tone and voice that resonates with how you would like to be viewed.
To identify your brand identity, here are some tips:
Determine your strengths, skills, and experiences.
Define your unique selling points.
Identify your interests, hobbies, and passions outside of work.
Research and establish your target audience.
2. Choose the Right Platforms
How you brand yourself will determine the type of platforms you invest in. Your target audience and brand identity are the most important factors when choosing a social media platform. They ensure you avoid branding social media fails by increasing brand visibility, engagement, and effectiveness of the personal branding strategy.
According to a Pew Research Center survey on the use of social media in America,
83% of U.S. adults use YouTube, 68% report using Facebook, and 47% use Instagram.
Consequently, X is the most popular social media channel among CEOs, with 50.3% using it,
followed closely by LinkedIn at 47% and Facebook at 45%.
With the right social media platform, business leaders can tailor their content and engagement strategies to reach their target audience effectively. Aligning your business goals with social media marketing is important, as this will set a strong foundation for your online presence.
LinkedIn’s data reveals that executives are increasingly active on the platform, with over 90 million senior level influencers and 63 million decision makers present on the platform as of 2021. This emphasizes the importance of LinkedIn as a key platform for professional brand building and engagement.
3.Mastering Content Creation
Crafting compelling and insightful content is not just about showcasing your expertise; it’s about ensuring your brand resonates with your audience. According to a survey carried out by SEMrush,
91%
of marketers achieved success with their content marketing, with articles containing at least one video attracting 70% more organic traffic than those without.
Below are ways in which you can elevate your social media branding efforts with content creation:
Define Thought Leadership Content:
First, identify your audience’s pain points and choose topics that are relevant and timely. Use data and research to support your claims and offer unique perspectives that differentiate you from your competitors.
Determine Your Unique Perspective:
Incorporate personal experiences and stories to make your content more relatable and authentic. Highlight your strengths, be transparent about your weaknesses, and provide innovative solutions to your audience’s problems. Establishing your unique voice and viewpoint will help you stand out in a crowded social media landscape.
Use Compelling Formats:
Choosing the right format for your content, such as videos, podcasts, and infographics, is essential to capturing your audience’s attention. Use visuals to simplify complex ideas and break up long form text, making your content more visually appealing and engaging.
Promote Your Content:
Creating great content is only half the task; promoting it effectively is equally important. Utilize social media platforms, email marketing, and influencer collaborations to reach a wider audience.
4. Be Consistent in Your Brand Imagery
Consumers are constantly moving between different social media platforms. To make your brand more memorable and reliable for the consumers to come back to, you need to maintain consistency with your visual elements, messaging, and overall brand experience. When executed effectively, branding consistency ultimately leads to stronger brand loyalty and increased customer engagement.
5. Reconsider Your Audience Engagement Strategy
An active engagement strategy humanizes your brand and promotes the creation of meaningful connections. This establishes your credibility as it presents you as an accessible leader who is authentic and transparent. This in turn builds trust and strengthens brand loyalty, which is essential for establishing collaborations.
This suggests that if your brand identity emphasizes personal engagement and transparency, platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn.
However, while social media remains a powerful tool for humanizing your digital presence, it may land you in a pool of branding failures if not well strategized and executed. Poor handling of comments and messages can significantly impact brand perception. Therefore, it’s crucial to respond effectively to comments and messages to maintain brand integrity.
Here are some of the most effective ways to respond to comments and messages:
6. Monitoring and Measuring Success
To know if your social media branding strategy is effective, you need to monitor if you are reaching and engaging with the right people. However, with the wide variety of metrics that can be exploited, it is easy for non-experts to get lost in the massiveness of data. To avoid these challenges that can lead to brand failures, it is important to choose metrics that align with your brand and then set clear and actionable goals, such as increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, or boosting sales.
Measuring and monitoring social media branding success empowers you to make data driven decisions, refine your strategies, and ultimately build a stronger and more impactful social media brand.
7. Learning From Brand Failures
As you establish social media as a storefront of who you are as a person and professional, remember that for every successful social media campaign, there is a possibility of experiencing brand failures. Learning from the existing examples of mistakes can help you navigate the complex landscape of social media branding more effectively and incorporate online reputation management in your strategy.
Below are some of the notable brand failures on social media.
Lack of Authenticity:
While authenticity sells when done right, representing your brand in an insincere manner erodes trust and credibility among the already established audience. A classic example of this is the case of Pepsi’s ill-fated ad featuring Kendall Jenner, which trivialized social justice movements and sparked widespread backlash. The lesson here is clear: authenticity cannot be compromised for the sake of a marketing gimmick.
Insensitive or Offensive Content:
If you want to succeed as a brand, you must tread carefully when addressing sensitive topics or current events to avoid significant reputational damage. One infamous example is the case of the clothing retailer HM, whose ad featuring a young black boy wearing a hoodie with the slogan Coolest Monkey in the Jungle sparked accusations of racial insensitivity. The incident serves as a stark reminder of the importance of cultural sensitivity and diversity in marketing campaigns.
Ignoring Audience Feedback:
social media provides a platform for direct communication between brands and their audience. As you look forward to interactions between your brand and target audience, the rest of the world is watching how you communicate. Ignoring or dismissing feedback from customers can ruin your brand reputation, especially now that the internet doesn’t forget. For instance, when United Airlines mishandled a customer service issue where a passenger was forcibly removed from an overbooked flight, the story took over social media which ruined the brand of united Airlines. The negative media could have been
avoided by listening to customer concerns and addressing them promptly and effectively.
Poor Crisis Management:
It is unfortunate how bad news travels faster in this age of social media. This means that crises can escalate rapidly if not handled properly. Brands that fail to respond swiftly and effectively to negative publicity risks worsening the situation. Consider the case of Nestle, which faced intense backlash over its use of unsustainable palm oil in its products. Nestle responded very slowly, an act that only fueled the fire, resulting in lasting damage to its reputation.
Don’t wait to be used as a statistic of brand failures. Take the action now.
Conclusion: Stand Out as A Leader
To emerge triumphantly from the jammed pool of social media profiles as a brand and leader, you need to craft a compelling personal brand that positively shapes your narrative. With authenticity, consistency, and commitment to actively engaging with followers, you build trust and credibility, foster meaningful connections, and unlock new opportunities for professional advancement.
Even so, success in social media branding goes beyond mere presence it requires diligent measurement and monitoring of key metrics to gauge effectiveness. The first step to ensuring you maximize what social media has to offer for the success of your brand is by partnering with a team that knows their way around structuring winning personal brands.
At Reactionpower, we provide Executive Branding Services that focus on helping leaders present their unique value proposition, expertise, experience, and professional achievements on social media.
