With over 2 billion users, social networks have changed to great tools to promote yourself as well as your business. Instagram, basically a visual platform, is especially a powerful social network to create and grow your personal brand. Here we would talk about this kind of branding and how to promote it using Instagram.
What is Personal Brand?
Let’s start with having a close look at the word itself. Many people still define the word “brand” in relation to a company or product. While it is not totally wrong, brands can define a person apart from the company or business he or she is working in. This type of branding is known as personal brand and show what a person is and like. It is a combination of a person’s interests, skills, traits, behaviors, and experiences.
Why is it important to build a great personal brand on Instagram?
A good personal branding, make you different from other professionals in your niche and help you stand out in your field. It gives you new opportunities to find better jobs and new customers, launch your own business or get promoted in your current company. People now would search your name when they want to use any of your services and having a strong personal brand is now more essential than anytime else.
The rise of social networks like Instagram made it easier and at the same time vital to build a personal brand. Social networks, cheap or even free to use, give a media to every person to stand aside from others.
You may already know people with great personal brands. To give you a hint about what this kind of branding means and how it works, let’s have a look at examples bellow.
Steve Jobs, not only was the founder of a corporate brand, namely apple, he had created his own personal brand as well. Known for his perfectionist trait, his personality and traits are being talked about today in relation to and also apart from his corporate successes. His personal image is associated with being restless in perusing goals and being innovative.
Another good example is Huda Beauty, first establishing herself as an influential beauty blogger, Huda is the owner of a powerful cosmetic company now.
Lele Pons is the other successful Instagram and YouTube influencer, first sharing visual contents on these platforms which then lead to her publishing her first book and becoming an actress.
How to create a great personal brand?
There are several platforms through which you can work on your personal brand, from different social networks to personal websites. To be successful in each, you need to stick to certain points. Before starting to use any of them, consider your goal and note that it takes time. It is not a product you would create out of nowhere, but an outcome of your previous products, efforts, and experiences over time.
Determining to have your own unique image, you need to create a vision as the starting point to get to in long-term and also determine your target audience, here more than just a group of individual clients. To create the perfect vision, you need to know your expertise as well. Instagram lets you reach your desired audience in a short time.
The next step is to find the best place to get exposed in front of your target audiences. Find the place where most of your audiences are active, keep them engaged and improve your brand constantly. Using Instagram, you have tools and features to find them in the right place, whether through hashtags, geotag or even another influential figure already working in your field. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools which help you on the way of building a strong personal brand.
How to create a unique personal brand using Instagram?
As you may know, having a great personal brand is more than exposing yourself as a great specialist on your field, it is also about being referred and recommended by people. So you need more than a profile in Instagram listing your skills and positions. The platform is all about sharing, writing and expressing yourself.
Here are some approaches through which you can create your personal brand effectively but before starting to use them, search for your online presence and remove the negative or unrelated ones. An unprofessional comment or behavior (even if it is for your past blog or social media posts) may damage your current image.
- You should express yourself on a daily basis through your content (pictures, videos, and captions) rather than writing a list of business positions and professional knowledge. You need to prove it rather than stating it. Select the niche based on your interest and expertise and target the right audience. Produce ongoing content which fits their needs. Don’t miss any opportunity when they are active. If you are in a different time zone or cannot be online at the respective hours to post on time, use post schedulers.
- Choose your voice and use Instagram tools to make your content unique. Don’t forget Instagram’s essence which is storytelling. Rather than just sharing technical contents, invite your audience to even more personal aspects of your life and make them interested in your everyday life. Your traits and personality are also part of your brand identity, use them properly.
- High-quality content is the most important prerequisite of social networks, especially on Instagram which is a visual platform. Creating high-quality content, whether you are sharing entertaining contents or professional recommendations.
- Help your posts to go viral. Use proper hashtags to expose your quality posts in front of a bigger audience. Yes, you need more than just content to get more followers. Geotag can also be helpful especially when you are thriving to appear to local audiences, try to get the most out of it.
- Here comes the important phase of getting involved with your followers and other Instagram users. Yes, as a person who is trying to build his or her own brand, you may have little time to engage with others or even post on time. But it is an important part of creating your personal brand on Instagram which cannot be neglected at all. To save your time for more important tasks, our solution is using automation tools through which you can engage with Instagram users without being online yourself. Tools like Instamber Robot, act on your behalf, engage with your audience by liking their posts and commenting on them, follow other Instagram users and send bulk direct messages to make them aware of your presence in this vast platform and consequently increase the number of your followers directly or indirectly (they may either engage with your posts and help your posts go viral or become interested in your page and follow you in return).
- Remember cooperating with other Instagram influencers, even people in your niche who may have overlapping interests and professions like yours. This cooperation should lead to a mutually beneficial relationship. Instagram is a vast platform with lots of users who may follow your rivals or fellow experts. You need to find the best influencers in your niche to get new followers aware of your presence. But besides that, being recommended with great names and influential users on Instagram is very effective in creating your image.
- A personal website is a key element is creating your brand particularly when it comes to SEO. Every single page on your blog, help you appear more and more on the search results. Use you Bio to link back to your personal blog. If you reach a certain number of followers, you can also use links in your stories.
