4 Obvious Personal Branding Trends For 2016
It’s 2016, and we’ve been writing about personal branding for the last couple of years. Trends have come and gone, but you (and hopefully your growing personal brand) are still here. While most experts struggle to decide what trend is going to be BIG this year, we’ve decided to be more practical. Here are four personal branding trends that are so obvious, but we still haven’t taken full advantage of them yet.
1. Learn From Platform-Specific Personal Brands
That said, you do need to keep an eye out for platforms that you can take advantage of in the early days.
While Facebook and Twitter are an obvious choice for expanding your personal brand on the web, both are very much mature platforms that have established presences by other brands – both corporate and personal. Yes, you can still become big on Facebook. On Twitter. On LinkedIn.
But becoming big later in the game leaves out some of the benefits that you could have gotten if you were among the first big personal brands there. When Mashable or the New York Times wrote about Instagram’s rise, they covered individual people that were making it big there, such as Skinny Kitchen.
The same was true for the top tweeps or the top YouTubers. The popularity of individuals on certain platforms became a self-fulfilling prophecy. EpicMealTime might have been a popular YouTube channel, but it used YouTube’s growing popularity among Millennials to grow its following.
As the platform you are popular on becomes more popular itself, you get all the benefits. Facebook and Twitter were first perceived as places where you’d follow friends. According to a new study, conducted by Pew Research Center in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, today clear majorities of Twitter (63%) and Facebook users (63%) say that these two platforms serve them as a source for news about events and issues outside the realm of friends and family!
The risks, though, are obvious. You can’t be sure that a platform will become popular. While lots of users, including myself, loved location-based social networks, these services never amounted to that much regarding personal brand benefits. While GoWalla was acquired, Foursquare is stagnating. However, a few years back, it made sense to create a profile for these growing services, hoping to one day be one of their top users.
How many of us flocked to Google+, with the goal of becoming a member of as many circles as we could? It’s a matter of trying a platform, seeing the potential and scaling up your efforts when the signal’s of that platform’s rise seem legitimate.
As the award-winning author Jeff Beals put it: ‘Go beyond the big three’. I’d recommend Snapchat as the platform to experiment with next!
2. Email Marketing For The Rest Of Us (In 2016)
While social media is both hot and useful, likes and retweets won’t do nearly as much as a well-written email that has a clear call to action. Companies, especially in the e-commerce space, have been using email marketing to drive sales for years.
Interestingly enough, it’s individuals that are can gain the most from email marketing – and the reason is pretty straightforward.
While some of us (myself included) don’t like email newsletters, we do like email as a platform that lets us communicate both with our friends and business partners. It’s the essential form of internet communication, and if you read any of the “Guides through the internet” of the 90s, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Unlike social networks that come and go (think Myspace!), email is here to stay.
It’s universal. We all have an email.
What you need to be doing in 2016 that you haven’t been doing up until this point is sending a useful, simple stream of emails that set you up as an authority in your field and promote your personal brand.
Not a newsletter.
Email marketing doesn’t have to be a “newsletter”. By that, I mean a weekly, template-based email in HTML that looks and feels like so many others that are sent both by other individuals and companies.
Yes, I mean HTML. Yes, I mean too many graphics.
Sending a newsletter like most marketing departments will land you in the spam folder, not get you into your customer’s share of mind.
Plain text emails work best, especially when sent through a platform such as Mailchimp (a very popular choice) or ConvertKit. The latter is a better example since it targets professional bloggers, individuals whose publications are built on their personal brand.
In 2016, you need to start reading about email marketing, a discipline that has been present for years in the digital marketing world, and taking advantage of all the benefits. In this case, going ‘old school’ is a way toward a brighter future!
3. The Company Blogging Celebrities Are Back
Remember Robert Scoble? Robert, who has a significant Twitter, Facebook and even Google+, following become the top tech influencer that he is by blogging for some technology companies.
He was Microsoft’s original blogger – a title that stuck with Scoble for years and is part of his early biography.
Let’s get back to the present. Corporate blogging was very, very hot a few years ago. Since then, the practice of writing content to promote a company has matured into a discipline we know today as ‘content marketing’.
The blog you are reading (hello!) is also an example of ‘marketing through content’. We write about personal branding because the long term plan is to promote it as a way of you realising that you need a digital presence.
Because a great digital presence requires a website, you’re going to need a personal domain name at some point in time. That domain, because it’s the best for personal business, is going to be .ME. Moreover, we want to help you use your domain to your best advantage, and be happy with your choice.
While a lot of corporations didn’t embrace blogging as they should have, even worse, some entered the content game from the wrong angle. Now they are coming back to content in a way. Be becoming your company’s content marketing writer of choice, you’ll be expanding your own personal brand – just like Robert did years ago.
4. Mobile: The Trend Personal Branding Experts Forgot
Call me obvious, but mobile and mobile apps are exploding. With over 800 million active users at the end of 2015, Facebook’s Messenger is becoming a new platform in its own right. Unfortunately, the personal branding crowd completely forgot mobile.
Not completely. Experts at one point recommended creating personal mobile apps that your fans could download. I agree that if you have an established personal brand and following, a mobile app might be the right choice.
If you’re Lady Gaga.
However, if you’re just starting out, a mobile app is more of a sign of your ego than your expertise. If you still want to make it, I’d recommend ShoutEm. But don’t. Instead, focus on the platforms that are defining mobile.
Viber. Whatsapp. Snapchat.
While most of these started life as messaging products, akin to Facebook Messenger, all of them have created some way for brands (including personal ones) to take advantage and communicate with their audience.
Viber has public chats while Snapchat has accounts. While you could put all of these in the same category with social media, they aren’t one and the same.
The difference is the content that is… mobile. Produced more quickly and with less production value, Snapchat videos are very, very practical. Even the ones that present the White House.
Mobile is also very personal, which makes it a great way of reaching your audience on the go. They don’t need to be at their laptop. They just need to have their phone in their pocket or bag. Which they do!
These have been the four obvious trends in personal branding you need to take advantage of in the new year. Will you?
