LoginSchedule demoLoginSchedule demoReady to amp your online presence or help get employees more active? Here are the best social media profile tips to build a strong personal brand online.
There’s no doubt, most brands are aware how valuable their social media profiles are for their business.
While having a presence on a few profiles is great, just existing is not enough to build a following, engagement, or drive leads and revenue.
And today, it’s inevitable that your employees are going to be online, active either from their computers or mobile phones during work hours.
In fact, many brands are encouraging employees to share by the use of employee advocacy platforms such as EveryoneSocial.
And if you have read our content before, you’ve probably come across these two stats:
Whether you are activating employees through employee advocacy or they are interested in tightening up their individual personal brands, there are a few social media profile tips you and your employees should consider.
Before I dive into the direct social media profile tips, it makes sense to explore why you want to build a strong personal brand on social media.
We know that your organization is probably working towards or has worked on creating a solid social branding presence.
But social media has evolved and became the go-to place to find information about you. Which is why you want to have a clean personal brand.
A personal brand is simply how you manage and direct your own narrative to others. It’s how audiences perceive you and what they know about you.
And social media networks are one of the major outlets for managing your personal brand online and being discovered.
All you have to do is a quick search of your name online and most likely, your social media profiles show up near the top.
Now, not everyone or every employee will care to have a personal brand. But regardless if you are active online at all, ensure you have some decent and professional information out there about you.
Having a personal brand is valuable for your professional career and even your avocational interests. But at a basic level, it keeps the narrative of who you are online straight forward and clean.
When people search your name or come across your online presence through social media channels, you don’t want that to be messy or incomplete.
You also do not want to give away highly personal details to avoid fraud and scams.
But on a professional level, building a personal brand through your social media profiles can do the following:
Related: Looking for more tips on building a personal brand? Download our personal brand starter kit to help elevate your results.
Whether you are looking to individually improve your social media profiles or build a strategy for employees as it relates to employee advocacy, there are plenty of tips to follow.
Below is a collection of some of the best social media profile tips.
Remember: if you plan on activating and encouraging employees to be active on social media for the brand, make sure to establish a great and accessible social media policy.
Before you dive in and start really switching up how you approach your social media profiles directly, you need to ask yourself some questions.
Now, is a good time to evaluate your profiles and what they currently say to visitors and your followers.
Ultimately, you need to ask yourself what you want to accomplish. What is your end goal for working on your social profiles?
Some sample questions you probably want to have answers for include:
These answers will help guide everything from your social brand, design, headlines and bios, content, and interactions with others.
Overtime as you stay consistent to your narrative, people will recognize you for what you wanted to accomplish with your personal brand.
Ideally, if you are building a personal and professional online brand you want to make it easy for people to find, follow, and connect with you.
These areas not only help you, but can help your colleagues build a consistent personal brand and a united front for their organization.
So there are a few areas to consider to get consistent across social channels.
1. Consistent social handles and names
Granted, someone else can have your name or use similar handles to you, so there may be some alterations needed. Having a username across your online profiles is beneficial and clean.
Think of how people might look for you and what they will see. If anything, while your unique identifier or “@” may not be your name, the least you can do is ensure your name is on your profiles.
2. Same profile pic across your channels
Although you might not want to make everything consistent, for the channels you want to allow a personal brand to develop for your career or for professional reasons should be consistent.
It’s a simple way for others to identify with you and be able to remember who you are and what you may look like.
And with any images (profile pic + banners), makes you have the sizes right. The last thing you want is something cutoff or blurry, it looks sloppy. You can get a list of all the social image sizes here.
3. Master your social headline or blurb
Your social headline is how you would describe your personal brand, your expertise, or how you are solving pain points for others.
Only a few short years ago for example, LinkedIn was just a way to showcase your resume and what you do.
But now, the platform has become a powerful marketing and sales too. If you are looking for work or a new job, then it makes sense to tailor the headline and blurb like a resume bio.
Otherwise, find a unique way to add value, pique people’s interest, and build yourself as an expert. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram are great places to highlight this.
For example a LinkedIn headline might be:
And in the description space, you can expand on your interests and expertise a bit further. But play around with ideas, try different things, and see what you feel best represents your brand.
Each social platform you are on is unique in how audiences like to interact and consume information. What you’ll want to do is find what cadence works best for the types of content you want to post.
Yes, a clean and consistent profile is only the first part of enhancing your social media profile and online personal brand.
And no, this does not mean spamming your networks every few hours with links and no context.
Sometimes people worry that is what employee advocacy is and I’ll tell you this right now – the most successful employee advocacy programs are not pushing anyone to spam their networks!
So whether you are sharing and creating content on your own or using your organization’s employee advocacy program, your content shares should include your own thoughts and ideas.
If it’s a link, then add insights, thoughts, or questions to what you are sharing. If you are creating general text content, help educate the audience about a subject, find ways to build engagement, and connect others.
And mix up your content. Use images, GIFs, videos, do live video streams, presentations, text only, branded blog posts, thirty-party posts, etc.
Keep your feed a fresh mix of interesting and knowledgeable insights and people will naturally start to gravitate more and more towards you.
There has also been plenty of research studies to find out the best times and frequencies to post on various social media accounts.
While these can be helpful, I’ve generally found it depends on your audience and the quality of what you are doing that really drives results.
Another huge missing piece to success on social media, is being a part of the social communities.
Sharing content and clean profiles are one thing, but you can attract more people and engagement by being active with others on social networks.
By doing these things, you naturally generate more curiosity and interest to your social media profiles.
This can lead to expanding your networks, greater presence for your company and cohort, more career and professional opportunities, and naturally you are being a trusted personal brand.
And this doesn’t really take much time to start doing as just a handful of minutes is required to begin engaging with social communities.
A small amount of effort to generate potential big ROI in the future for your brand and positively impact the reach of the company you work for too.
Writing an impressive social media profile might seem easy, it can be challenging sometimes to convey yourself or personal brand accurately.
And knowing how to make yourself stand out among the crowd, but also ensuring you are attracting the right connections can take a bit of effort.
Here’s how you can write a strong personal profile for social media:
Know the audience you want to attract. What are their interests? Industry language? What would interest them on your profile? Speak and write how your target audience would.
Avoid the third-person in your bios or headlines. Everyone is aware you wrote your information and wants to engage with you. Write like you are having a conversation face to face, you’ll be more personable and relatable that way. Be human.
Keep it detailed, but don’t write a book. Your bios and headlines will have some character limits, but doesn’t mean you need to max everything out. Attention spans move fast on social media, so you need to captivate your audience quickly. Get to the point, your value, and background within a few short sentences.
Use stories. If you have not noticed yet, social media has really evolved into storytelling, even from actually company accounts too. Stories are more relatable, interesting, and helps paint a picture to who you are. The standard marketing and sales copy does not have the same effect.
Todd served as Director of Marketing at EveryoneSocial, leading content strategy and editorial across the blog through 2021. Today he is Head of Content & Brand at RemoFirst, founder of Linkeezy (an inbox and content tool for LinkedIn), and a SaaS marketing and content advisor.
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