How to Build a Personal Brand on Social Media Successfully

Even if you’re not interested in building a big name like Mr. Beast, Kylie Jenner or Mr. Macaroni, if you have a successful personal brand on social media, you can leverage your influence to push your ideas, build a business, get jobs or get into collaborations with top brands.

I am not saying this as an outsider. Although we were not even big, building a recognizable personal brand on the social media was one of the biggest leverages we had when we first launched victorwinners.com.

And it was not a one-off event. I have also seen many people who have been able to build successful businesses out of their personal brands on social media. Talk about people like Gary Vaynerchuck, Kim Kardashian, Linda Ikeji etc.

Most of these brands did not start out with plans to become as big as they are today but somehow, they figured out a way to use their influence, expand it and turn it into a huge social capital that can drive ideas. In this post, I’ll be sharing with you how this was done, using our own experience, insights and lessons from other successful brands.

Know your Audience

You’re not going to build a brand that appeals to everyone but there are people that will gravitate towards your brand because that is what they want. Your goal is to find these people.

Ask yourself, who are these people that will most likely be interested in my brand? What are the things that matter to them? The answers to these questions will equip you with important information you’ll need to build a personal brand on social media successfully.

Even if you were to stumble on social media success, if you plan to sustain it, you have to know what matters to your audience so you can keep providing these if you want to keep them interacting with your brand.

That said, I agree that most personal brands on social media do not start out knowing who their audience should be. Most people just want to post on social media and interact with others, not to build platforms.

But, when you realize you’ve started gaining traction, it is important you become intentional about growing your platform going forward.

I still remember when we started, our goal was not to build a big brand or anything spectacular as at the time. I just wanted to post what was on my mind, connect with friends and share my ideas.

After my content started resonating with some people and we started gaining some recognition, I decided it was time I gave our audience more of what they could easily resonate with.

At the end of the day, your audience will have a very big influence on your success as a brand. And you must know who they are and what works for them, if you really want to grow your brand.

Define your Values

Outside your audience, values that define you as a person are a very important core of your brand as they are also going to influence the people attracted to you, be it on social media or elsewhere. You want to define your core values as early as possible while you’re building your brand.

Now, when you want to build a personal brand on social media, you first of all start with identifying what matters to you. It helps you in creating a message that will appeal to your potential target audience.

For us, some of our core values were positivity, personal growth and transformational leadership. These values influenced our brand in many ways, including our positioning, the content we shared and how we interacted with our audience.

Portraying, projecting and keeping this brand as a core of our social media activities eventually attracted to us an audience with values that aligns with ours. This also helped in getting them to take specific actions when that was needed.

As a brand, you have to know your values and what matters to you. Define it clearly before building a personal brand online as this will shape a lot of things around your brand.

Find a Niche for your Brand

You might not have started out with a specific kind of content but as you begin to gain traction with your brand, it is important to evolve a niche you can easily align with.

As a beginner, you might want to create just about any type of content to see what works but that is not strategic.

Most popular content creators started with nearly every niche they could think about yet as their brand kept growing, they eventually found a sweet spot that could effectively serve their brand ant their audience.

As someone that plans to build a brand on social media, you need to grow, find an audience and get recognized as soon as you can. And one of the smartest ways to do this is to find a niche, create for an audience in that niche then grow from there.

Even if you started as a generalist, you can always align your brand and create a niche much later, based on the feedback you’re getting with your brand and your own brand goals.

This is the strategy we have used to evolve our niche over the years.

Create Content that Resonates with your Audience

Look up the creators ranked in lists like the Forbes Creators list and you’ll find that most of the top creators in that list are popular because they create content that easily resonates with their audience.

As someone that plans to build a strong personal brand on social media, you need an audience that can easily connect with your brand if you want to build a loyal fan base.

To achieve this, you have to begin with building values, content and a positioning that this people can easily identify with

Over the years I have noticed the following as some of the key elements that will make a piece of content more attractive to an audience.

• Value. For any content to be relatable, it needs to provide a specific value to a specific audience. This means your content has to meet a need for your target audience. And this need could be entertainment, information, education or practical tips.
• Emotional Connection. Tell relatable stories. People are easily moved by stories. Use your own personal stories and real-world examples to create and share content that is relatable and human in a way that your audience can easily see themselves through the things you create.
• Authenticity and Trust. Be real. Build trust and grow your credibility with your audience. Eventually this increases their likeness for your brand. And when your audience gets to like and trust your brand, it becomes even more for them to be loyal to your brand.

Content is at the core of what you’ll use to grow your brand. And if you really want to build a strong personal brand that is easily recognizable, then your content must meet the needs of your audience.

Offer a Unique Perspective

There are more than 5 billion users on social media. Millions of these users do have a brand and they do create content at intervals.

With such a large number of people, brands can easily get lost or go unnoticed. But when you have your mind set on building a personal brand on social media then you have to take on steps to stand out. Yes!

I know this can be hard. With the number of content posted on social media, you’d think that it will be very hard to post or share things that no one has ever heard, read or seen elsewhere.

But you’ll be surprised because every day, people are creating and posting content and ideas that are getting thousands of likes, even when some of these contents have been posted at some point.

When we started, on some days, I was not sure about how I was going to create content that could resonate with my audience without sounding inauthentic. But even on those days, we found a way to bring our point of view to bear on our content.

From sharing personal perspectives to relating a general concept to our own situations, we were able to evolve very unique content. And this made a lot of difference.

At the end of the day, you don’t have to recreate the wheel. Instead, find your own perspective, make it stand out and appealing to your target audience.

Start Simple but Be Consistent

You don’t have to come out with full force. You also do not have to get everything right or even feel perfect before getting started. This is one of the issues that has destroyed a lot of personal brands before they could start.

If you want to build a personal brand on social media successfully, be prepared to start small, right from where you are. This is one of the strategies that worked for us.

We posted from the heart, simple and easy stuff. It was not about posting content that will go viral or even content that will be considered the best in the niche. It was more about posting our truth; content that worked for us, our audience and showing up consistently while at that.

There were some things from those early days that I wouldn’t post today because we’ve outgrown them. But that’s the beauty of growth and we wouldn’t grow, gather new experiences if we did not step into create.

This is the story of so many popular people we know today. Khabby Lame for example started with very simple videos before going viral during Covid 19.

Gary Vaynerchuk did not have a large follower base when he started his wine library on YouTube but he showed up everyday like it mattered.

While planning to build a popular social media brand, you have to realize that you don’t have to be the best but you have to create great content that matter to your audience and you have to show up consistently.

Measure your Outcomes

As a personal brand on social media, make data your best friend. Pay attention to feedback, interaction and insights from every single posts you make.

These feedbacks will help you in shaping your brand.

For example, when you pay attention to feedback from your audience, you may find that a piece of content resonates more with your audience or that posting at a particular time will attract more engagement than others. There are a number of tools you can use for this.

Also, set clear goals for your brand and take steps to measure your outcomes against those goals at intervals. Find out what is working and what is not.

In addition to your goals, measure your strategies. The social media is very dynamic. Changes in algorithms and trends are ever evolving. If you’re keen on building a personal brand on social media, measure your strategies at intervals to be sure they are still delivering on results.

Final Words

Anyone can build a personal brand on social media but if you want to build a brand that stands out then you have to do the work.

You must put all these tips into practice but even beside that, before you start building your brand, remember that you must get your goals sorted, build a realistic plan and get started on the right footing.

Also, you must not be afraid to show up, to make mistakes or even fail. These are things that could also be used as part of insights and experiences that make your brand relatable.

And finally, signing up for our social media training at Win Media Academy can get you skilled up, mentored and guided to build your brand successfully. You can get started here.

Now it’s over to you. What are some of the challenges you face when it comes to building a rock solid brand on social media? Drop your comments below.