You agree that social media is the first catalyst that will boost your reach and now you are ready to try your luck on it. Now we are talking, let’s learn the second most important lesson on social media marketing for personal branding: how to choose the right social media platforms.
What’s good with social media is that you use them every day so you are familiar with them. Learning their use for branding purpose will not be too difficult for you. Still, you need to look beyond your most visited social media platform and dive into those that work for your particular talent and specialty.
Yes, your usual YouTube or Instagram may not work for building your brand as a thought leader in Blockchain industry. So how do you choose your social media platform to gain the right attention? This post will tell you.
Know Your Expertise in Personal Brand
You need to define your expertise with as much detail as possible. Look at the level of technicality and specialization you possess. You can be a developer but your expertise surrounds building small, one-manned projects and you specialize in full-stack development rather than in certain languages.
Your expertise and reach is totally different from that of an AI engineer or a security engineer. This difference will change your marketing and branding expert needs entirely.
Identify Your Clients
Who makes your perfect client? Some expertise and skills are targeted towards individuals. Other professionals will find themselves dealing with small and medium teams. Some would specialize in working with startups. In the end, some professionals will only lend their expertise to big corporation because of the nature of their skills.
You will also want to specify the demographics of decision makers among your target customers. If you are selling B2C services, your clients will be individuals. For B2B services, managers and directors are who you want to approach.
Identify Their Decision-Making Behaviors
Now you know the identity of your clients, you can learn about their demographics and then their psychographics. The demographics will include the typical physical attributes of these people. You will have to learn about the age group to which your ideal clients mostly belong, their gender, and the budget they will have at disposal.
Using this information as well your understanding and experience with these people, you must dig deeper to understand their purchasing psychology under their psychographics. For example, baby boomers used to prefer solid numbers to decide purchases, while later generations started inclining towards emotions, values, and ethics more.
A few factors that you should consider in this analysis include the research capacity of these people, if they like to be on the fence for a long time before committing, and their need to trust a person and his authority before buying. These factors will determine the intensity of your branding efforts as well as telling you how technical and specialized you want your chosen social media platform to be.
Map Out Your Stakeholders
The next big thing you want to do to build your social media strategy is to learn about your stakeholders. Most people who are trying to build their personal brands carry out this step when building their personal branding strategy. But you can also take your time doing it right now if you have skippd this step at that time.
Your stakeholders aren’t limited to your customers or potential customers. This group of people also include supporting executives and businesses. To map out your stakeholders, ask yourself about the people and businesses who will benefit from your skills and from whom you can benefit. These will include educational institutes, media outlet, government, suppliers and vendors, competitors, and government.
Analyzing these groups of stakeholders and their needs from you will help you in the later stages of defining the social media marketing services you will need.
Learn about Their Information Sources
Nowadays, people have shifted towards internet to listen to happenings around them. You cannot expect your clients to read load of newspapers or printed journals. Instead, you will want to find out the online sources of information they use most.
These will most likely be blogs and online journals. You can also check out communities and Q/A forums that tackle the everyday usages issues related to related tools.
While these sources are a great stepping stone for you to build your presence on, let’s leave that part for more sophisticated levels of personal branding and focus on social media part, for now.
Mostly, all these online sources are connected with social media platforms. You have to list down all these social media platforms used by all the sources relevant to your industry. Once you have collected these platforms, you will like to shortlist only those platforms which are most popular. Again, this list should help you with that. Check those platforms which appear on most sites, blogs, and journals. These are the platforms that you want to use for initiating your social media management game.
Experiment
Now you have selected a few platforms to exert your efforts, move forward and start making yourself visible over there. You may get too excited at this point thinking that you are building your brand on social media, but it’s not like that. At this stage, you are only getting your feet wet. You have yet to figure out which platforms will work for you and which ones won’t.
Give this step some weeks to gain clarity and insights. You will find that some platforms will appear indifferent and unwelcoming to your brand in your first few interactions. You can exclude these platforms straight away. But spend more time on those platforms that seem tricky in terms of reach, but have a strong presence of likeminded people.
Wrapping Up
Social media marketing is an essential tool without which online personal brands cannot succeed in today’s world. It’s normal for brands to be skeptical about the platform they should use for their branding, after all, there are hundreds of similar platforms available on the internet.
Don’t worry if you feel lost about the platform you should choose. Selecting a social media brand is easier than it sounds. All you have to do is to take a methodical approach to brainstorm and lock those outlets that will work for you.
