End Of Summer Branding Tips: From Oprah To Web Design
The most straightforward possible tip about personal branding is also the one that is neglected the most, for one reason or the other. What we want you to do is to never ignore anything that can improve your brand, and that surely includes simple things that people very often take for granted. So, the first thing to think about when thinking about personal branding is – you need a strategy. You can call it an outline, a battle plan or whatever you prefer, but a good strategy and planning will make whatever you’re doing much better, and personal branding is no different.
Before starting to brand yourself, you need to grab a piece of paper or a note-taking app suc and write down your goals first. This helps you visualize what you’re trying to accomplish by branding, and it can be really everything from “I want a 100 000 followers on Instagram” to “ I want to connect with 15879 people over social media” and once it’s there, you’ll be able to clearly visualize what it is that you’re trying to do with your work. The goal needs to be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely).
You Figure d Out What You Want, Now Define How You’re Going To Get There
Of course, it’s not just the goals that matter. Next up is to figure out a set of platforms and channels that will help you succeed in that goal. If you’re interested in fashion and your sense of style is unique and well thought-out, you should focus your work on Instagram first. It’s a platform that benefits people like yourself in so many ways, you’ll struggle to think of a way as to why you never started doing this in the first place. Of course, never neglect Facebook and Twitter, as they are the basic social media sites that certainly allow for you to reach audiences and communicate with your potential clients in real-time.
Once you’ve planned which social media sites you’re going for, you need to plan out how are you going to present yourself there. Is your Tumblr going to be pastel-colored and cute or a little more serious? Are you more of a photography kind of person or a typography freak?
Questions like these need answers so that you can use them to make a compelling argument as to why is your personal brand unique and necessary, and how you’re going to make it the best that ever was.
You Get Advice, And You Get Advice! Everybody Gets Advice!
The second advice we have for you is to simply be out there. This is really well noted in the example of one of the most important people when it comes to personal branding , Oprah Winfrey. Everybody knows who Oprah is, and even if someone has never seen the show she is the most famous for, the name Oprah evokes a dose of respect and authority few celebrities can channel. Because Oprah’s legacy spans decades of success, there’s little to say that isn’t already well-known.
It’s also hard to put a finger on the exact thing that Oprah did that made her so famous, but that’s due to the fact that Oprah was simply, well, Oprah. She is the best example of “keeping it real” and being the same person whenever and wherever she goes. Oprah definitely didn’t get ruined by fame, she embraced it and used it to spread out good in the world. You can take this advice and use it to make your personal brand similar to Oprah’s. The way you can do this is pretty simple: don’t get carried away with the ways you can present yourself online, and things that you need to change on yourself to appeal to more people, no. Instead, be real and be yourself.
Oprah uses her influence to challenge people to be the best they can be, and you can do the same with your own followers. Being followed by people on social media can be an excellent way to spread out good vibes, positive attitude and make a positive change in the world.
Remember when Oprah got everyone a car? Of course you do. Go out and do memorable things, whatever they are for your audience. Don’t try to change who you are because of the social media, change social media to love you for the way you are! Change social media to love you for the way you are!
Consistent, But Recognisable
The third advice and the one that might be the most use for you in this exact moment is to keep your brand consistent across your social media accounts. This might look like something you could shrug away, but hear us out.
Have you ever thought about how your writing style, profile pictures, names and overall look of the profiles are different across your social media? Well if you’re serious about your personal brand, try to ditch that and make it all similar.
There are a lot of blogs that can teach you how to be more consistent on social media, like this post on the Hirerabbit blog, and this one on OMNI online. Reading about it can show you how it’s done on the examples of Reebok, Coca-Cola and more. The main idea is that your audience isn’t getting confused by the way you act on different social media outlets, so the way that you post, link, manage, and design your pages is all important in the long run.
Your brand isn’t all that different from Pepsi or RedBull, and both of those companies have similar Facebook, Twitter and Instagram profiles. When it comes to personal brands, things are surely more complex, but you should aim to make all of your social media profiles similar when it comes to these general things.
Profile picture – This is the way you’re noticed in the world. Your LinkedIn picture is the way your potential job providers will see you, your Facebook profile is probably the most viewed one and so on. Having one profile picture across all of the media lets you do one amazing thing: be recognizable. If people become friends with you on Facebook, they might Google you to see what you’re all about. It’s there that they should be greeted with all of your profiles with the similar profile pictures so that they know that is really you. This might seem simple, but it’s really a very easy hack to let you be more noted online. If you’re having completely different profile pictures, someone might even think that the profiles on your Instagram and Facebook aren’t the same person, especially because the Instagram’s profile picture is oh so small.
Protip: Get an app that makes your photos great, such as the utterly amazing Prisma, or our favourite lightweight photo editing app Snapseed. This can give you a little bit more ammunition when finding what to post online. There’s also Google Camera, that can help you make some really great 360-degree photos and photo globes, something that might come in handy someday, some time. You never know!
Style and writing – If you’re a funny person on Facebook, and always have something witty to say on Twitter, don’t make your Instagram and Snapchat dull and too serious, please. If you’re known by your friend to always make amazing memes and photos on Instagram, don’t hesitate to put them on Facebook too, okay? This way you’re connecting your social media accounts and making them all intertwined with the same style of writing, a style that screams YOU when your visitors and viewers see it. You need to spread out your personality over all of your accounts, and be the same person everywhere, because when it comes to branding, uniformity is key, as well as originality.
We’ll be talking about photographs in no time, but right now we’re going to tell you how to get your hands on a few extra memes and photographs that might make your audience enjoy your blog a little more.
First up, Imgur. The community that is seeing an insane amount of success by doing precisely what you’re doing: making things online. You should really start an Imgur account and start hanging out there, too, because a lot of the things that come to Facebook are pretty much recycled funny posts from Imgur and Reddit.
Speaking of Reddit, if you haven’t yet started being a Redditor, you should waste no time and go straight there. The world’s largest gathering of people from all sorts of nations, cultures, and businesses can really answer any question you might have about anything, even personal branding! Give this article about branding tips a read, and also try out this one, and you’ll see why Reddit is called „the homepage of the Internet“.
A Few Extra Tips For Good Measure
Speaking of originality, there’s a few more extra pieces of advice we can give you to make your brand shine, that aren’t really ground-breaking tips but some friendly advice from us, to you. One of them is to invest a little time and money into making yourself look more professional. That may range from simply putting a professionally-made photo of yourself as a profile picture, or making a blog and a personal website that are as polished and streamlined as they can be. If you’re feeling extra cheeky, you might even invest some money into goodies that you can then give away to your audience as a reward for following you or sharing your posts. This is a nice touch and it certainly isn’t something you’re obligated to do, but your audience will surely feel good about it if you do.
If you’re in need of some professional photography advice, we got that too. A great thing is that you don’t need much except for a good phone, which you probably have already. Apps like Google’s Snapseed and all sorts of others will help you tune your photos just the right amount so that they turn out great, but if you want more control over your social media photography, you should look into using one of the more professionally-oriented apps such as Camera FV-5 for Android. With a small investment up front, and some photography tutorials and courses, you can play around with ISO values, exposures and a lot of the stuff that professional photographers use every day. Your smartphone is with you all of the time, and unless you’re really into photography you shouldn’t pursue the purchase of a big, expensive camera: social media photos are not that large in size after all.
Protip: Because of the aperture of different smartphone cameras, if you’re all about that selfie you might find that putting your face in the middle of the frame and a little bit further from the camera will give you the best results possible. That is due to the way the selfie cameras warp the edges of the photo to fit more people in it, the same way a GoPro camera has that “fisheye” look to it. So the next time you’re taking a selfie spread your arm a little more and aim yourself to be at the centre of the frame. It will help!
If you don’t want to do it all yourself and really need a professional’s help, you could enlist a freelance photographer from a site like Upwork or some other freelancing network, there’s really a lot to choose from. Once you find a person that you deem the ablest to fulfil your wishes, simply walk them through your terms and needs and get to work on the best photos you could ever think of!
Winter’s going to be here in no time, and you should definitely be prepared for the busy season that is ahead of you. You can boost your personal brand now, at the end of the summer, and you’re going to see nothing but good results in the following months, we assure you. While this advice might prove valuable, the biggest piece of advice we can give you is to be yourself, be original and be creative. After all, that’s what .ME is all about!
