Personal Branding Weekly
Editor’s Note: This week took us from covering how career advancement is progressive to how your personal brand can survive as mom, entrepreneur and executive. The Young Entrepreneur’s Council even chimed in on the importance of interesting content.
Dive on in to the list of posts and glean information that’s helpful to your personal brand:
- Be Patient – Career Advancement is Progressive by Deborah Shane
- What I Wish I Knew as an Undergraduate by Jun Loayza
- Why Do You Brand Yourself as a Desperate Candidate? by Phil Rosenberg
- Be Careful What You Call Yourself by Nance Rosen
- Setting BEST Goals for Your Personal Brand by Heather Huhman
- Olympic Action for Entrepreneurs by Elinor Stutz
- 7 Writing Tips for Personal Brand Building Success by Roger Parker
- 12 Ways to Create Interesting Company Content in a Boring Industry by The Youth Entrepreneur Council
- Career “Stalled”? Have New Career Opportunities Come to You! by Skip Freeman
- The Ten Commandments of Twitter by Oscar Del Santo
- Summer Vacation: How to Balance Personal Branding and Parenting by Manoush Zomorodi
- How to Meet People in a Room Full of Strangers by Erik Deckers
- How to Show the Value of Your Work-Life Balance by Glassdoor.com
For this upcoming week, we’ll delve into personal branding mistakes and what you can do to move your personal brand from stuck to success.
Personal Word of Mouth and Scheduled Posts
Early this year, Facebook introduced a new feature that lets you craft your status updates in advance and schedule them for posting automatically. Before this, you could only update your status message on-demand. Either that or you had to use one of a number of available third-party tools such as HootSuite, Ping.fm and Buffer. These online apps let you automate your Facebook status updates by setting the update times throughout the day.
Building consistency
The scheduled posts are a great timesaver and a great help in maximizing their efforts and making them more efficient. Being able to schedule updates in advance allows you to employ a content schedule to full advantage. A content schedule is like a calendar that plots out what you intend to post when you plan to post it. Following a content plan provides you with a cadence or a rhythm to your posts that highlights your consistency. Consistency helps build your credibility as a communicator and a reliable source for the audience you target with your Facebook updates. When your audiences know when to expect your posts, you build a reputation as a consistent and reliable source of information and insights.
Increasing audience engagement
The other advantage advanced status posting offers is increased opportunities for engaging your audiences. As you become more regular and reliable with your posts, people get more used to your online presence. At some point in time, some members of your audience may begin responding to your posts. You may soon find more and more people joining in as the conversation begins to resonate with them.
Focus posts to trending topics
There are a number of things you do need to watch out for when working with scheduled posts. First, there is the danger of getting off-tangent with important topics. Since there is no way to predict what topics of interest will emerge within the next few days, and since there is no way to tell how existing conversations will unfold, you could prepare content for posting that can quickly turn stale. Fortunately, Facebook lets you search for and edit advanced posts, so you can fine tune your content as necessary. If, for example, a topic suddenly resonates with your audience and you have not prepared any posts to touch on it, you can edit the upcoming posts to steer conversation toward the trending topic.
Things to watch out for when scheduling posts
The next thing to keep in mind is that scheduled posts work well with a lot of content, but not with all content. Status updates and links seem to work well when scheduled for posting, but photo albums, events and milestones require more current, hands-on treatment. Keep track of the type of content you intend to post, and handle these accordingly.
When working with third party scheduling apps, one of the side effects is that posts are stamped with the originating app, announcing to people who read your posts that you used an automated scheduler. This may be okay in most cases, but it may also be a disadvantage, especially if you are trying to project a hands-on image. Fortunately, Facebook does away with this distinction so that when you prepare advanced posts, your readers will not be able to distinguish these from content posted in real time.
Author:
Maria Elena Duron, is managing editor of the Personal Branding Blog, CEO (chief engagement officer) of buzz2bucks.com – a word of mouth marketing firm. She helps create conversation, connection, credibility, community and commerce around your brand. Maria Duron is co-founder and moderator of #brandchat – a weekly Twitter chat focused on every aspect of branding that is recognized by Mashable as one the 15 Essential Twitter Chats for Social Media Marketers.
