Assessing Your Personal Brand: Personal Branding Metrics

Keeping tabs on your personal brand and your reach are important when you consider your current strategy and what you need to revise going forward. Simple assessments of your personal brand are easy with a few tools to use each day that will allow you to gain a base level and easily track future progression.

There are many complete tools that allow you to do this, and Brand-Yourself has recently introduced a complete tool that will allow you to have a complete picture of your brand. If you are looking for an in-depth dive of your personal brand, I strongly recommend you consider this tool. If you are looking for an introduction to personal brand metrics, here are a few tools to get you started.

Bit.ly – Most of you already know about this as a URL shortener and how popular it is especially by Twitter users. What not everyone knows is that if you add a plus sign immediately after the bit.ly URL, anyone is able to see general statistics about that particular link. To see the type of statistics from bit.ly you may see more with this link: http://bit.ly/aFVDJz+.

Digg – A great social media site that allows anyone to highlight web sites/links and have other viewers vote the page/article up (digg) or down (burry). This is a great site to see how popular web pages, articles, blog posts are through the public eye.

Su.pr – This is a URL shortening service from StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon allows users to categorize web pages, articles, blog posts and have the other members “Stumble!” across these items and share with others. If you use su.pr to post to Twitter or Facebook, the metrics are built in to see the number of clicks, retweets, and best times of the day to post based upon your Twitter follower network.

Twitter Lists – A great tool built right into Twitter. Twitter lists allow you to not only see how others brand you but to see how many people you affect. For example, on May 18 2020, the @Brandyourself Twitter handle had 8,871 followers and appeared on 591 lists. This is an impressive number. If you divide the number of lists into the number of followers (8871 / 591) you will see that the result is 15.01. Why is this important? This means that 1 in every 15 followers put @Brandyourself onto a list. This is a great number and shows that BrandYourself is adding value to a high percentage of its network.

Google Analytics – If you write a blog or manage a web site, Google analytics are fantastic to understand your reach. How are people finding your web site, how many clicks, where traffic is coming from and so much more.

What I have outlined are just a few tools that are available to anyone to use, but there are many many more tools that I did not touch on today. Take your time and look at each one to see which one, or ones, make the most sense for you.

These are all simple means to manage your brand. One way or another you should, and must, gain insight on your brand and the information that is out there on you and the information that you publish. Simple steps can lead to big results, it is worth your time investment.

Picture credit goes to CNBMIT Co., Ltd.

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Keith McIlvaine manages the recruiting social media strategy for a Fortune 500 company and is an avid networker. He is a corporate recruiter, social media advisor, coach, speaker, blogger and an all around fanatic. Connect with Keith on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or on his blog at the HR farmer. (The statements posted on this site are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer)