Five Tips On How To Brand Yourself Online

Your personal brand needs to positively reflect your reputation.

By: Angelica Perez

Image from @scalbsu on Instagram

The Student Communication Association (SCA) from CSULB held a “Building Your Personal Brand” workshop on February 11, 2020 to help students on how to professionally represent themselves on the Internet. The workshop was detailed with helpful tips that every student can benefit from, especially in this day and age where having a digital presence is essential if you want to have a career in PR, marketing, journalism, etc. 

1. A strong brand is consistent 
In order to get the most engagement, you need to aim to post at least three to four times a week. They can be regular posts or stories but staying consistent shows your audience that you are active and the more consistent your messaging, the more consistent your branding will be. You need to make your audience aware of your product, aka you. A great tool to make sure you are posting often is Hootsuite. This website helps you track and manage your social media channels. 

2. The 50-30-20 social media strategy
This rule is a great way to outline your social media marketing efforts. It is suggested to have 50% of engagement (memes, behind the scenes, jokes, things you are involved in), 30% is to inform (educate your audience) and 20% is for promotion (plug your own programs, activities, events and yourself). It is important to have a good amount of different content or else you will bore your audience. 

3. Credibility
This tip is very important because if your personal brand is not credible, then no one will take you seriously. Make sure your grammar is perfect in every social media post because people will be judging if it is not. A helpful tool to help you is Grammarly, especially when you are writing blogs. Grammarly automatically detects spelling, punctuation, word choice and style mistakes.

4. Expand your knowledge on more resources
To be a well-rounded skilled person, you should learn how to use different programs. A few that will help you look like a talented individual are Canva, Adobe Spark, Adobe Suite, Google trends, Mailchimp and Audacity, just to name a few. 
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5. Google yourself!!!!
Cleaning up your social media profiles has to be the most important tip anyone can give you because you do not want to be seen as a negative person for something you posted online many years ago. It is highly recommended to take the time to go back to your old posts and delete anything that you think your target audience will not like.  

Presenting yourself in a positive way online is very important for your future career. It makes you look professional and it helps give off great impressions when people see your online presence. Once you follow all these steps and learn how to brand yourself online, then you are ready for the real world.

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