Personal branding infographic: 4 steps to build your personal brand

According to a Jobvite study on recruitment methods, 55% of recruiters reconsider a hire based on the candidate’s social profile.

This makes it easier to understand how important it is for everyone to know how to promote themselves online.

For example, the personal footprint of Jade Dominguez, a self-taught programmer, got him hired by a company without ever responding to a job posting!

How can you develop your own personal brand in turn? This is where the concept of personal branding comes in. This method simply refers to applying the communication techniques you would use for your brand, to yourself.

To do this, you first need to carry out some strategic thinking, including:

• choosing your objectives,
• an editorial line,
• communication channels,
• keywords that represent your role, your industry, and your personality…

Then, a second, operational phase comes into play, with the creation of:

• your blog or personal website,
• your social media accounts,
• opinion pieces in the online press…

Finally, you’ll of course need to update these channels as your career evolves so that they keep all their freshness and relevance.

To improve your visibility on the web, discover our infographic: 4 steps to successful personal branding.

1. DISCOVER your personal brand.

• Work on yourself to position yourself and plan ahead, then set your objectives. It’s important to know who you are and what image you want to project before you start.
• Ask yourself the ultimate existential question: who am I? Look back at your journey, your accomplishments, your mistakes… This introspective work can help you position yourself better and gain confidence by getting to know yourself better. Don’t hesitate to ask those around you how they perceive you and to Google yourself to get a better sense of the image you project.
• Determine your ideal objective. To do this, ask yourself two simple questions:

1. “What do I want?” This will help you get to know your personal and professional objectives better.
2. “Who am I addressing?” Clients, partners, employees, suppliers, investors, business partners… You need to address each target audience in a specific way in order to communicate effectively on the right channels. For example, LinkedIn can be a preferred channel for reaching your investors, and Facebook for your clients.

• Set medium- and long-term objectives. This will give you a time horizon that’s conducive to measuring the results you achieve. To do this, create a kind of marketing plan that lets you break down the various operational actions along with the type of target audience to reach over a given period. Looking for a job? Your objective might be to get contacted by recruiters through your personal website, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Are you an executive looking to demonstrate your expertise? Your objective might then be for the blog articles you publish to be shared on social media. Or to gain a certain number of followers on Twitter.

2. CREATE the editorial content that showcases your expertise.

• Determine the channels best suited to your role, your web culture, and your visibility objectives. Highlight your success!
• Put yourself forward with high-quality photos. The image you project must be consistent with the image you want to convey.
• Create your professional website or blog, along the lines of www.firstnamelastname.com. This will also give you visibility, showcase your expertise, and, why not, help you get noticed by the media.
• Define five keywords about your expertise and three keywords about your company/industry. Write your professional biography in the first person, without neglecting your SEO strategy so that your target audience can find you on the SERPs. The way to keep your audience from dozing off? Storytelling! People love good stories. Turn your journey into a story, spell out the reasons, the decisions, and the events that brought you to where you are today. Don’t leave out your failures — show that you’ve been able to learn lessons from them. Demonstrate your successes by relying on figures and concrete examples that showcase your skills. Adapt your message, your tone, and the events to each of the platforms you write on

3. COMMUNICATE your expertise.

• First, determine the level of social engagement you want and choose the social media that best suit you.
• Take control of the professional social networks LinkedIn and Viadeo to master your communication. These social networks each had 10 million users in France in 2015. LinkedIn, for its part, gains two new members every second. Join discussion groups related to your interests. Engage with the community — that’s the key! LinkedIn recently opened up its blogging platform on its French-language version. Why not take advantage of it to write about the topics you’re an expert in?
• Twitter is an opportunity to spread your messages on behalf of your company and stay in touch with journalists and thought leaders in your industry. It’s also a very good monitoring and curation tool for sharing and staying informed about what’s happening in your industry. Twitter is also a community with great potential. You can identify influencers in your industry, engage with them, and, why not, become one yourself? Tweet and retweet the information you find interesting related to your area of expertise. And don’t forget the hashtags, of course!

4. MAINTAIN your digital presence regularly.

• Stay on the lookout, share your professional news, and build your reputation and identity over the long term, all while staying consistent.

• Select and promote your main channels in your email signatures, business cards, conference materials, etc. Use offline to reinforce your online presence and vice versa. That’s what the biggest brands do. Don’t hesitate to promote your various digital channels at trade shows, conferences, seminars… In short, become your own press officer!

• Regularly update the information about your personal brand! There’s nothing worse than an online channel that isn’t up to date. Your online activity will show your target audiences your commitment over the long term. Be active and proactive!

• Monitor mentions of you in the media and on social media using the keywords first name + last name. How? Simply Google yourself. A free tool like Mention lets you monitor in real time, respond, share, and relay content to your communities. Another free tool, Google Alerts, lets you create customized searches. Semji’s dashboard, for its part, lets you set up monitoring and a diagnosis to gain an overview of your online reputation.

Conclusion: “letting change happen can only help you” (Nicolas Bordas)

You now have everything you need to enhance your personal branding.

Indeed, at a time when 55% of recruiters look at social media and 87% of business leaders worldwide consider reputation risk to be the most important strategic risk for the company, why deny yourself controlled visibility?

This will also make it easier for a person to be recruited and for an executive to strengthen their company’s goodwill.

As Nicolas Bordas, Vice President of the world’s fifth-largest advertising network, TBWA Europe, explains: “creating a personal brand isn’t that difficult. The main thing, of course, is what you create and how you treat the people you interact with. The way you define yourself, the way you get back up after failures, and the way you find ways to move forward in your career: letting change happen can only help you.”

Learn more about our personal branding offering for executives.

The steps proposed in this article are inspired by the book “Me 2.0” by Dan Schwabel, adapted by Fadhila Brahimi.