Building a Personal Brand on Facebook

Building up a personal brand is a crucial factor of effective business networking. In the age of social media branding, this has become an even more vital step to success.

With millions of competitors vying for the attention of similar target audience pools, how do you make your business stand apart on social media, especially on a platform like Facebook?

The task requires some perseverance and effort. Like any good marketing strategy, brand-building requires meticulous planning, supervision, and updating. Companies like Socials Up offer several services to increase the engagement of your posts, make your profile more authoritative and give it a social proof to flaunt off your trustworthiness. However, you can build a personal brand on your own as well.

Here is a quick guide on all you needed to know for creating your brand on Facebook.

What is Personal Branding?

Simply put, personal branding is your conscious presentation of yourself. Whether you are marketing yourself or your business, you probably have a certain expectation of how you wish to be perceived by everyone. What you do online to achieve this is your way of building your online personal brand.

While what you do enables creating your brand, how you continue to present yourself will act as a cue for others to maintain that impression or change it as the case may be. Since your audience forms perceptions, personal branding requires you to be constantly vigilant of how your actions are getting your audience to react. You must be ready to change your POA based on your audience studies.

Why Do Businesses Need to Put Special Effort into Creating a Personal Brand on Facebook?

Personal branding is a way for you to relate to your consumers both online and offline dynamically. When it comes to branding yourself online, you must keep in mind how the social platform metrics operate and the reactions visibly seen from your audience reach. Even if you are not very socially active, every time you put up a post, like a post, or comment on something publicly, you contribute to the impression people are making of your brand. Hence how you behave on Facebook plays a significant role in how people on the social media platform acknowledge your brand. If done right, your brand will:

• Build your credibility;
• Establish your authority position in your field;
• Enable you to increase your social influence;
• Build your reputation;
• Enable you to monetize your presence.

Common Mistakes to Avoid While Creating Your Brand on Facebook

While there are several Dos regarding Personal Branding, the Don’ts are very important and should be kept in mind at all costs. Here are some common mistakes Facebook users find themselves making concerning personal branding:

1. Believing it’s not for you

If you have an account on Facebook, you are already creating a brand presence for yourself. It does not matter whether you are a business or a student. Your account is out there for scrutiny and study by everyone, including your teachers, your prospective employers, your clients, alongside the entire internet surveillance system.

Building a personal brand pertains to everybody and at all levels of Facebook usage. As it is not very easy to do that, many users look for alternative ways like to buy FB page likes and followers to increase their reach.

2. Leaving your target audience undefined

A big blooper in creating a personal brand does not know who your intended audience is. For successful reach, impression, and turnovers, you must be clear of your primary target audience at the micro level for each post as wells as at the macro level in terms of your long-term goals.

3. Getting too many followers to build an impressive follower count

While follower counts do give your account a widespread impression, they do more harm than good in the long run if they do not interact with your account. In other words, building up an inorganic and inactive audience count brings your engagement rate down on Facebook’s metrics making your account/page less visible on user feeds. This automatically brings down your success rate in bringing in fresh engagement and audience interactions.

4. Being unauthentic

While several users rely on fake accounts with fake names (which is different from using pen names or pseudonyms), being unauthentic is a bad idea for anyone trying to build a brand presence. Apart from running into legal issues, you can lose all the credibility you built by pretense once you are found out. A better idea is to show your authentic side selectively. Keep it safe, and keep it legal.

5. Not keeping track of your online activities

You are in charge of the online narrative you choose to build around you. To be able to do this, you must self-scrutinize every little action you take on the social media platform – whose post you like, what comments you leave, who you make friends with, and so on. Every action counts, and you must be careful about what you do.

6. Ignoring your social environment

You cannot exist in isolation on a social media platform. You must be aware of trends and events. You must keep yourself up to date with what your competition is doing, what influencers are favoring, and what your niche community, in general, is focusing on. Not only must you be aware of it, but you must also find unique and authentic ways to participate in the existing discussions and trends.

Now that you know what you must avoid let’s look into some of the must-dos to build your brand up favorably on Facebook.

Here are some Foolproof steps to get you going in the Right Direction:

• Build a complete profile

People who want to follow you and engage with you will do so based on what you put forward in your profile. This includes providing:

1. A clear profile picture that you want your brand to be associated with. This could be a logo, a face, or a recent work/product of your company. If you are active on several social media sites, it would be good to use the same profile photo everywhere to allow for easy visual recognition and brand building.
2. A working URL. Whether it is a link to your independent website, blog posts, or e-retail, provide a link that works and lets your visitors understand you better. Build your brand with information that will allow your target audience to find you.

• Build Organic Connections

As already mentioned, a massive but inactive follower count will not help you in the long run as it brings down your engagement rate. Your engagement rate is calculated based on likes, shares, comments, views, clicks, and reach, so your audience must interact with your account.

Concentrate on building organic and active connections instead. Some ways to do this include:

1. Let your audience find you and follow you.
2. Follow strong leads like influencers and game-changing brands in your field, and interact with their account activities.
3. Initiating and sustaining conversations in professional communities.
4. Call to action and directly ask your audience to interact and follow you across social media platforms.
5. Cross-post content on other social media sites to let your organic followers know of your Facebook account.
6. Spring clean your dormant followers from time to time.
7. Build power connections that will enable you to sustain and monetize your brand.

• Be Polite and Approachable

How you communicate and interact with fellow users of Facebook can go a long way in reinforcing or breaking the impression they have of you. It is always a good idea to

1. Be polite in all your engagements, even in situations where you are aware of interactions being left by trolls and bots.
2. Be prompt in answering any comments and questions.
3. Hold conversations that do not intimidate or put off your potential consumers.
4. Do not give in to emotional outbursts when reacting to anyone’s engagement.
5. Always keeping your interactions professional, authentic, and civil.
6. Accept mistakes when you make them with the same civility and grace.

• Build Trust

The more credible your brand is, the higher will your rate of conversions be. Hence a key goal for your online networking should be about building trust. If you can get your followers to spread a good word or two about you, that is all the better because it leads to a free marketing funnel for your brand. While placing Facebook ads can lead to a short-term increase in your visibility, getting organic likes, shares, and favorable comments are likely to keep you on a high visibility rate on the social site for more extended periods. To create trust, you must prove your ability to be trusted. Concentrate on making your post content with this in mind. Publish and share statuses, posts, and videos that showcase:

1. Your expertise in your field;
2. Your ability to lead discussions in an informative and engaging manner;
3. Provides testimonials to your services and authenticity.

In addition, be consistent in your manner of presentation and standpoint on subjects if you have already made your alignments and leanings public. Your overall online activities should show your integrity. If you can convince your visitors with your actions, you are sure to see an increase in your engagement rates.

An excellent way to do this is to make frequent use of Facebook Live. By live-streaming to your audience, you can show your authenticity in the field you claim your expertise on. Take on questions from viewers, engage and interact with your audience and humanize your brand. Share your brand story in a fun, simple, yet practical fashion while pushing your account’s visibility up on user news feeds. Build trust by being available to your audience for all their queries and concerns.

• Treat Networking as an Investment

Even if your brand primarily conducts business offline in a physical format, you must not ignore the power of social media networking and image building. In today’s times, your social image can impact your financial performance offline in various ways as it has become the primary source of building public opinion. Always be attentive to user-generated content and work continually to keep your social networking strategies up to date. Your branding strategy will lay the founding base for how you are perceived, so this is an ongoing long-term investment for your business. Participate or create events, engage with your niche community productively and be an organic member of the social media platform. You will soon see a change in your conversions and engagement metrics.

In Conclusion

Facebook personal branding is not complex, and it just requires your constant attention and intelligent planning. Keep yourself updated on Facebook’s new features and rules to ensure you are making full use of the social platform to your advantage. What goals you have for your Facebook presence will ultimately determine how much effort, finances, and time you need to invest in your brand-building exercise.