New years can be a great time to check in with your personal branding efforts. New Year’s Resolutions can be polarizing. Some people swear by them, other’s hate them, others could care less. So, if you love new years resolutions, here are some tips to check in with your branding efforts. But if you hate new years resolutions, it’s still a great time to check in. Plus, these tips can really be applied at any time of the year. So, let’s get into it, shall we?
It’s always a good idea to make sure you’re revisiting and evaluating your personal branding materials and efforts. Personal branding isn’t a ‘set and forget’ type of thing. The only constant in life is change. Who we are and what we do isn’t completely static, so continually checking in with things like your personal branding statement, photo, and strategy is important.
Here are 5 steps to checking in with your personal brand:
1. Evaluate your personal branding statement.
Your personal branding statement is a crucial element. Making sure the statement still fully resonates with you and your vision and passion for work and what you do is important.
Your personal branding statement should encapsulate your mission, your value, and not be filled with empty hyperbole and buzzwords. It’s important that it truly fit you and the work you do, so it’s important to check in to make sure it’s still in tip-top shape.
2. Does that headshot still look like you?
It can be hard to admit that we don’t necessarily still look like our favorite headshot. Maybe it’s a few years old, or maybe you completely changed your hair color, cut, etc. Or maybe you got glasses. Whatever the change, it’s important to make sure your headshot that you’re using across your social channels and platforms would help people recognize you when you meet them in person.
3. Analyze your social efforts.
Depending on your strategy, you likely started working on better optimizing and using social media to build your personal brand. Have you taken time to look at the data and understand how your efforts are working? Have you tested different types of sharing articles on that platform? Different media to go along with your posts?
It’s crucially important to measure your efforts and success with social media. If you’re using a platform like Buffer to post updates across channels, there are built-in analytics to see how your posts are performing. For example, you can sort by most popular post within a set time frame to see what performed best, or if you’re curious what post maybe prompted the most comments, you could filter by that too. If you’re publishing via the native social platforms themselves, you also have access to lots of analytics. The data you can access will vary from platform to platform, but all have great information. Twitter, for example, will show you at a glance your top tweet for the month, top mention, top media tweet, number of tweet impressions, and more.
Regardless of the platform, you’re focusing on, it’s always important to track how you’re doing so that you can measure success. It also allows you to see what types of content is resonating with your audience as well as visuals that make your posts stand out in the crowd.
4. Check out your competition.
Here are Delightful we’ve talked a lot about competitive analysis and scoping out the competition before. I’m bringing it up as a tool in checking in with your personal brand because it’s also helpful to check in with your competitors as well. What are they talking about? What platforms are they most active on? It’s important to know what’s going on around you in your industry. Maybe you’re looking to pitch to new conferences, and in order to best gauge pitches, you should know who’s talking about what, in order to differentiate yourself from the pack.
When you’re checking them out, don’t be solely focused on the stats. While social platforms give us the ability for data comparison, it’s important to be qualitative as well.
5. Make time for writing.
Not everyone has the same strengths, and writing wouldn’t be on everyone’s list. If it’s not something you identify as a strength, that doesn’t mean you should avoid it. It just means it’s time to make time for it.
Whether it’s sitting down to craft a few thoughtful tweets, a blog post on your website, or an article on LinkedIn, it can be helpful to actually schedule the time to do so. It doesn’t need to be a huge chunk of time, as that can be overwhelming. Even just putting 10 minutes on your calendar regularly can help you sit down to write.
Check up on your personal branding strategy
New Year’s resolution or not, it’s important to periodically take stock of your personal branding efforts and make sure you’re putting the best foot forward. You don’t want your efforts to fall flat because you never checked to see how your strategy was working. So, take some time to check in with your personal brand and make sure it’s in tip-top shape.
Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to: subscribe to The Personal Brand Lab, follow @Delightful on Twitter, like the Delightful Facebook Page, and join us on LinkedIn.
Kylee Schmuck – Digital Marketing Specialist at Delightful
These are great tips. I am an emerging PR professional, and I know I need to get a new headshot! The one I have currently on my LinkedIn I am blonde, but now I have brown hair. I will get right now that! Thank you for sharing. Personal branding is important. It is helpful seeing your top 5 tips.
The concept of personal branding is very daunting to me. I have always felt far more comfortable making a first impression in person, rather than making one based off of my portfolio and online presence. However, I know that’s the name of the game now, and I need to start becoming more confident in my personal brand. For this reason, I found these 5 steps very helpful.
I have a tendency to use the common and boring buzz words when describing myself and my work. I recognize that these empty adjectives do nothing to set me apart. Therefore, I hope to work on the principles outlined in step 1, and incorporate specific and genuine skill sets, interests, and experiences into my brand.
Even though my appearance hasn’t changed much in the past few years, I have a different profile picture on every one of my social accounts. I think it would help my online presence significantly if I used a consistent headshot throughout.
Through school I already hone my writing skills on a daily basis, and I find that scouting out my competition is more daunting than useful at this point in my life. However, there is never a bad time to strengthen and clarify who the world sees me as through my social media accounts, and this blog has encouraged me continue doing so.