AlterNation Episode 11: Personally Branding Your Business

Welcome to AlterNation! Today we're talking personal branding with social media- what it is, and why it's important.

Personal Branding is a pretty new concept for regular people. In reality though, it's simply a new form of reputation management; one that takes place online. Put simply, personal branding is marketing the brand of you. There are plenty of reasons to want to do this, ranging from simply wanting to expand your career options, to a major campaign of trust for a brand. To some the idea of personal branding may seem unnecessary, but to others, especially freelancers, personal branding is massive.

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Chris Garrett of SocialMediaExaminer.com recently wrote a great article on boosting your personal brand with social media. He gives 5 suggestions that may be second nature to many, but remain valuable at the same time.

1. Reap What You Sow
2. Model Real Life
3. Be Likeable
4. Share, Share, Share.
5. Conduct a Wuffie Audit.

Some of the major points to take into account: Figure out what you want to get out of personal branding. Put value into your online activities if you expect to gain value. Be a valuable friend online, someone who is likeable and worth following. Share the best of your web experience, and share your knowledge. Finally, audit your social capital and figure out what's working, and what's not. You can read the full article here, and I highly recommend that you do.

Here are a few tools you can use to get some statistics and analysis on your online endeavors.

Twinfluence: Measures a Twitter account's influence.

Twitter Grader, Facebook Grader, Website Grader: These are tools from Hubspot that run some analysis on your web presence. Website grader is the most useful of these, but the information provided via the Twitter and Facebook graders can also be useful. They both feature a tag cloud with your most mentioned words, you might want to make sure that what you're saying the most is good for your brand. One of my most common words was "awesome", what if that was "awful"? I'm trying to be fun to follow, not someone who spreads misery!

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