When you face the job market, whether it is your first time or to improve your current position, it is essential to work on an attractive “personal brand.” To achieve your work goals, it is necessary to reach the companies that interest you and that they look at you as a candidate to cover their needs. Currently, some tools offer many possibilities to help you create that personal brand. This is the case of LinkedIn, which can be used to highlight your strengths in the world of work and which has become a precious space in the professional field.
But What Is Personal Branding? Do You Know This Concept?
In 1999, Tom Peters popularized the concept of “personal branding” in his book “50 Keys to Making a Brand of Yourself”. The book exposed the need to transform our person into a brand in line with the evolution of the work organization system and the advancement of technology, taking responsibility for managing and disseminating it following our objectives for the world of work.
Personal branding is a concept based on marketing and branding, which considers oneself as a commercial brand to differentiate oneself. It is about transferring an image of ourselves as attractive as possible, highlighting the qualities that best define us and differentiate us from others, to achieve tremendous professional success by following a strategy.
And the following reflection would be, what benefits do you get by creating and developing your brand?
Creating and developing a personal brand requires work, time, effort, and perseverance, so we must ensure the benefits it will bring us. It is a proactive way to direct your professional career and control how the labor market perceives you.
This way, you will:
- Generate trust.
- Show yourself as a professional expert.
- Differentiate yourself and specialize.
- Increase your perceived value and attract job opportunities, among other benefits.
Once You Are Convinced Of These Benefits, How To Build An Excellent Personal Brand?
Get to differentiate yourself. To do this, look inside yourself and manage to identify what differentiates you from others. Analyze your values, skills, aptitudes, attitudes, experience, studies, motivation, etc.
Design a strategy. You have to be very clear about the professional field you want to develop and even the job you want to occupy and direct your messages towards them. A good action plan ensures the success of your brand.
Choose the channels through which you will spread and communicate your brand. It can be online, offline, or both, which would be most appropriate. In the case of online, one of the main tools to achieve this is Social Networks. In this context, Linkedin can be of great help to you as it is an excellent showcase with a lot of information about you. It is the first professional network in our country where you can create and develop your brand profoundly, value your professional profile, and highlight what you contribute and how you stand out.
And You Will Ask Yourself, Why Is Linkedin For Your Brand?
LinkedIn is a social network that can help you create your brand since it is aimed at the professional field. It offers extensive tools and possibilities to highlight your strengths and the best of you in the professional world.
Your brand is not just a summary of your Curriculum Vitae. No matter how clear the breadth of your training or the relevance of your professional career is, that is just the beginning. It also includes what you do and how you can do it and, especially in this world of connections, what network of contacts you have to enhance performance in the workplace.
On Linkedin, you can find trained people, references, professional experts, or colleagues related to your work or professional field, and you can also contact them. It is a network that brings enormous benefits to your brand since it offers you the possibility of knowing many companies looking for professionals to include in their templates. By building your network of relationships on LinkedIn, you add an essential component to your brand.
Once this network of contacts has been created, it is essential to keep it updated.
And finally, how to develop your brand on Linkedin?
Create a profile that is as complete as possible, and that differentiates you from others. To do this, try not to leave any fields empty. A complete and well-constructed profile is the beginning of your professional success. Some pieces of advice:
- A professional title that attracts attention
- An extract of a profile and professional objective that contributes to and differentiates you. Avoid repeating truisms and unoriginal statements.
- A photo that conveys a professional and smiling image.
- An experience detailing dates, positions, and functions that reflect your entire professional career.
- Include professional images and videos that bring your profile to life.
- Remember to include the keywords by which companies will find you everywhere. They are those that search engines recognize and that define your professional interests. This section is crucial.
Recommendations and validations are also important, as in all social networks, they are precious. They are the ones that talk about you and your network of contacts. They are instrumental in building an excellent personal brand with prestige and a good reputation. Ask your contacts for recommendations and validations personalized, highlighting your strengths or what you stand out for and differentiate yourself. This way, your brand will stand out from the rest.
You must not forget to add value to your network by creating good content on Linkedin to highlight your brand. By sharing this content with your network, you strengthen and improve your brand. As in all social networks, having a profile and not using it makes no sense. It is even harmful to the personal brand.
The content to share can be both external (enhancing the visualization of the content of others by sharing and commenting) and internal (of own elaboration, it is the most expensive). Both are effective, although you position yourself as an expert and reference in your sector with the internal content.
Content marketing brings excellent benefits, and on Linkedin too. You will be able to capture users’ attention, as in the rest of social networks. It is also essential to interact with your contacts who can help you create quality and exciting content. For this reason, Linkedin is also the place where you can learn and stay updated with exciting content and talks given by experts.
Speaking of the network of contacts, it is essential to create a quality network to obtain greater visibility and interact with contacts, which helps build your brand. The LinkedIn mailbox (where the communication is private and not public) helps to foster the relationship with your contacts, whom you can even get to know personally.
Although it is not written anywhere, there is some reciprocity in returning post recommendations and comments. It is a way to build your brand based on relationships of trust within your field of professional interest.
We can conclude that creating and developing an online personal brand is laborious but essential to start your professional development. You must take care of it throughout your working life to continue growing, improving, and learning. It is a constant task whose results are seen in the medium and long term if the work is well done.
Also Read: The Secret To Getting More Engagement On Instagram
