Social Media is becoming a mandatory part of every day life and an essential part of career success in this day and age. Brands that had been having trouble or are just looking for an additional push in sales are seeing resounding success due to their digital media campaigns like Old Spice, Google, Chrome, and Starbucks. If brands can do it, so can you. In this article I will briefly outline some social media tools that can help you moving forward as your digital presence in blog, podcast, social networking profiles are your online fingerprint and it is how people can connect with and discover you.
1. Analyze Your Life
First you will need to decide what your personal brand is and what you hope to achieve out of your digital media campaign. So take a good look at where your life is , your day to day responsibilities, and the amount of resources you have. Be realistic in this, as if you have a 14 hour a day job and 2 children at home you won’t be able to dedicate the same amount of time as someone without those responsibilities.
Are you a graduate or looking to finish school? Are you looking to start a company? Or perhaps you are looking to get a job at a specific company that has always been your passion? You need to have an answer to all of this and more before you can use these tools as it will change your goals, and what you communicate.
2. Personal Branding
The most successful social media is built on a network leveraging the strengths of the person behind it and is completely authentic; it causes a stronger bond between your audience and it is how they relate to you.
Just like with any marketing you need to choose a goal or mission statement. Who are you? Why do people want to look at your stuff? A single picture/colour scheme /profile description need only be written once and can serve you across every platform. Invest the time in this so that you personally would want to read it, as that is what will make others read it too. But remember it isn’t a job title it tells people who you are and why you’re there.
3. The Social Media Aspect
So at this point I’ve done a lot of talking about your life and your brand but made no mention of the tools to use. This is because you need to know what you’re doing before you can know what you need. You’ll want to be in areas that people look for someone with your experience or expertise. You’ll also want to be in social networks to create some buzz.
– Facebook
– Twitter
– LinkedIn
– Youtube
– Flickr
– Delicious
– Digg
– Stumbleupon
– Ning
If you are looking for specific social networks for financial, doctors, real estate agents those exist as well but you’ll need to put some time into researching the communities you want to be part of.
4. Your Presence
So now you have your profiles, you’ve decided what your brand is. Where do we go from here? Now you need to submit content; a lot of content needs to come through via written, audio or video. If possible you would want a combination of all three. On places like reddit or dig, you’ll want to share interesting articles so when you share your own people are more likely to click them. You need to be actively involved in the communities you have chosen to market yourself in.
On your profiles you need to find interesting topics to distribute and original content is always a plus. You need to be committed to this and passionate, otherwise you won’t see the results you are hoping for.
Unfortunately just creating the content won’t be enough to make this a success. You have to market your marketing. As mentioned before you need to be an active community member, become a leader if you can. Comment on other blogs in your industry and guest post if possible on other sites. Go so far as pitching your guest post ideas to journalists and forums so that people begin to recognize you and what you stand for.
5. Watch it Grow
There are several different ways to do this but the bare minimum are free tools from Google and twitter. Search.twitter.com and google.com/alerts both provide links to microposts and google will catch any alert in macroposting that cites your name. You’ll need to pay close attention as fast reaction times are key. You can leverage good endorsements of your brand and find negative messages to prevent it from spreading further.
Let us know how it goes and if you see any growth from this! We love community feedback. Soon to come: How to build the community you want on a blog to leverage the social media presence you just started.
Hilary Brooks
Hilary Brooks is President, CEO of A Virtual Edge, a full-service virtual assistant company, and Owner of freelance web design company Small Biz Web Whiz. Hilary and her team offer a wide variety of services to busy entrepreneurs, speakers, coaches, and bloggers, providing the office and creative support they need to succeed without all the hassles of hiring a traditional employee.
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