Strengthen Your Personal Branding in Just 5 Minutes a Day

If you’re not thinking about personal branding then either you’re not job hunting or you’re not interested in getting a promotion. Wait, what? Nobody who’s working falls into those categories? You’re right! Which means what? Everybody needs to be thinking about personal branding – not just tech people, social media fanatics or the millennials. Everybody.

But (almost) everybody seems to be too busy to worry about personal branding. And (almost) everybody thinks they should do it but don’t know where to start. Well, I’m telling you it takes only 5 minutes of your time everyday to create a strong, relevant, up-to-date personal brand that you can be proud of. Here’s how you do it.

1. Create Accounts on Key Networks in Your Industry

What many people do is they create accounts on everything – Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and then they don’t maintain them. They’re like ghost offices. So you need to know what’s important – i.e. where are the people you’d like to meet in real life “hanging out” online. To figure this out, all you need to do is Google them. Most likely, the majority of them will either be on Twitter or Linked In.

2. Use the Right Images

If you don’t want to waste time “maintaining” your social accounts use profile and cover images that are relevant throughout the year. Make sure you have a professional looking profile photo, but that doesn’t mean it you need to be wearing a suit. It should be one where you look happy and hopefully natural. As for your cover images, consider the following ideas:

• Use quotes that represent who you are
• Take an image/quote of an inspiring person in history
• Use a welcoming image from nature

3. Update Your Profiles Regularly

If you’re going to have an account on a social network you must make updates. What should you write about? Anything relevant to yourself and your industry. But remember one thing – it’s a social network – even if you have options of making ‘private’ updates of any sort it’s not really private. You need to consider all social networks as a broadcasting network. And use them to connect with people – professionally and personally.

Now it can sound intimidating to update everyday. But the easiest way to do this is to pick one time in the day, morning, lunch or night and update across all networks. You could even copy/paste the same post (just make sure Twitter accepts the whole post, all the others usually do).

4. Join Groups

Again, this is something that you want to be selective in. And this is perhaps most powerful in LinkedIn because of the nature of the network. I recommend picking anywhere from 3 to 5 groups which are active in discussions. Join them and comment at least once a week. So if you’re spending 4 days posting to your personal accounts, you could spend one day posting to a group. It doesn’t have to be LinkedIn – you could chose Twitter, Facebook or any other network relevant to your business. Just make sure to be active.

5 minutes a day is all it takes to create a successful personal branding strategy. What do you think? If you want to see an example, check out how I’ve shared all my social accounts through my Twitter background. It’s nothing fancy but works to let people know where all I’m present. And if you want more tips on Personal Growth, join my mailing list and I’ll send you updates straight to your inbox!

Photo Credit: Daniel Kulinski via Compfight cc