Personal Branding: Beware The Bright Lights Of Twitter!

Every time I ask employees to tell me what is stopping them from becoming more social with their personal branding, the most popular answer, by far, is that they do not have enough time. Well, this may not be popular for some but after spending the last few months totally deconstructing what it means to have successful personal branding, my advice is simple...if you're just starting out, do not start with Twitter. Why?  After studying lots of research about publishing frequency on different social channels (this study from Buffer is just one example) it became apparent to me that you're best of investing your time (at least initially) on other platforms where your impact will make more difference.

• Twitter:  Tweet at least 3 times a day.  Optimum 14x a day (week days) and 7x a day (weekends)  No max.
• LinkedIn:  1-2 times a day - week days only
• Facebook:  1-2 times a day - Thursday to Sunday for best engagement
• Blogs:  Consistency is more important that frequency.  Top bloggers post up to 3 times a week

Source: Infographic on social publishing If you only have a small amount of time to commit to social branding, focus that time where you will get the most impact.  Build upon that and then...only then...when you feel comfortable, expand onto other social platforms. First things first: Before doing anything on social, get your professional image up to scratch on LinkedIn.  Some basics include having a photo, writing a punchy headline, securing your URL, updating your skills and writing a summary that will make you stand out.  By the way, there's some homework to be done before you get to this stage.  If you haven't figured out what your personal brand is all about then you'll struggle to position yourself and your values. Now get networking: Once you have fixed up your profile, concentrate on building your network.  Later you'll move onto sharing but there's no point in sharing if you have a network of 20 people.  This is an organic approach.  Don't set aside 1 week and blast out 100 invitations to people you vaguely know.  You'll be blacklisted by LinkedIn.  Instead, concentrate on the people you know. Once you've done that you can start connecting to folks outside of your normal sphere using personalized invitations on why you want to connect.

• 50 connections will get you a LinkedIn All Star profile
• 300+ is what I think most people can achieve
• 500+ means you're doing pretty well
• 1000+ means you're a pretty good networker and I'd expect most sales people to be in this bracket

Now start social listening and reading: Continuing your professional development is a best practice anyhow.  It's shows your commitment to ongoing learning and keeps your on top of your game.  In the land of social, it also gives you content to share with your network at a later date but for now, consume information.  Notice I still haven't mentioned Twitter?  Read.  Learn.  Digest.  You're positioning yourself for the next step in your social journey...social sharing. You're ready to start sharing: I've written a different post about sharing on social media.  Essentially you should concentrate on three types of sharing.

• Sharing other people's content (publishing to your LinkedIn network on a regular basis...don't over publish!)
• Sharing your insights and expertise (interact with other people's content by leaving comments, liking and sharing)
• Sharing your content (start writing a blog.  Once a month is fine to start with - it's more important that you're consistent than frequent at this stage)

In my view, Twitter comes along somewhere in between "Sharing your insights and expertise" and "Sharing your content".  If you have enough time to get those activities done, then you're in good shape to start building your Twitter profile. I expect folks will disagree on this guidance so would be interested to read other perspectives.