Personal brand on social media: where to start

4 min read
21 January 2021

Let’s talk about cases you need an Instagram account to build a personal brand.

Where to start when building a personal brand

It does not matter if you are a coach, marketer, or cement dealer. Instagram will help you. The help will be different: sometimes it will mean attracting customers, sometimes – visibility and recognition.

How does it work? If you deal with some topic, run an Instagram account, and have a few thousands of followers, you become very visible in your field and your town.

What can happen then? They start inviting you to events. Say, you are invited to an event to make a presentation and tell about your business and management strategies.

When you come to give a speech and share your experience, you become noticeable for your potential customers and partners.

How to build an audience on Instagram

Now, on Instagram, you can build an audience for free if you run collaborations with other bloggers and other people in your field. You can do live broadcasts. You will be getting more followers. That is an excellent approach to networking and getting a targeted and high-quality audience. But it is quite a long-term goal.

You should be very patient when using that approach. A quicker one is buying advertising from bloggers. But if you choose this, you have to spend your money. You have to learn how to buy advertising.

You need to be very patient when applying that approach. A quicker one is buying advertising from bloggers. But if you choose this, you have to spend your money. You have to learn how to buy advertising.

In this case, the number of your followers will be growing, say, a thousand or a few thousands a week or a month. It will depend on the strategy you will develop to buy advertising from bloggers.

Building a personal brand on YouTube

YouTube is a complicated platform to stand out. YouTube requires much effort from you to spend on developing a channel. You need to generate content all the time.

But what is the biggest advantage of YouTube? If you understand how to work with the platform and learn all its peculiarities, you will get subscribers and views for free. Because now YouTube is practically the only social network that can give you free followers by itself. And it is also true for views. And you will even get money via partnerships.

You need to find your format for YouTube – it should attract people but should not take much time.

For example, the interview format is a great thing. But it takes a lot of money. Expert videos are also an excellent solution.

If you want to develop a personal brand and you are ready to spend effort and money, YouTube is an excellent choice for you. YouTube is not as much about money as Instagram. You need to invest money in your Instagram account or do mutual PR campaigns. If you understand how YouTube works, you will get money, views, and subscribers.

Public speaking for building a personal brand

It does not require money, as one might think. Of course, you can pay to participate in a big forum. But this is not always the case. If you pay but your presentation is unsuccessful, you cannot benefit from it. Public appearances are a thing that allows you to promote yourself as an expert very quickly.

Being an expert in any field and having started to speak in public, you will build your reputation in that field. It means that you need to leave your comfort zone because public speaking is scary, hard, and stressful for most people. But when you learn how to do it and interact with your audience well, you start enjoying public speaking.


Facebook and VKontakte for building a personal brand

VK is a platform where still there are people of the so-called “old school”. VK is not so important now. Nevertheless, you still need to repost your content to it from other social networks just to make the content available on the platform. Because you still can get job offers on VK from time to time.

VK is a secondary channel, while Facebook is a niche channel. On Facebook, there are top segment audiences. If you like writing posts and discuss topics with your audience, you can promote yourself via Facebook.

Facebook is more relevant for networking. If you need to find some experts in a specific field, better use Facebook.

Telegram as a platform to build a personal brand

Telegram is a network where you need to: а) generate content by yourself, b) interact with your audience and make posts by yourself, c) make reposts of interesting articles and other content from other channels.

To make a Telegram channel grow now, you need to invest in it. But you can sell advertising there. Socio-political issues are very popular on Telegram. If it resonates with you, this is the platform you can start building your brand on.